David Tuite

David Tuite is the founder and CEO of Roadie, a company in Dublin, Ireland, that runs Backstage, the open-source developer portal framework Spotify released, as a managed service. He has been in the internal developer portal market, as he put it on the Ship It Weekly podcast, “since its genesis.”

A portal at Workday before portals had a name

Tuite was a software engineer and then an infrastructure product manager at Workday, where his team built an internal developer portal before Backstage was open source. He remembers what the old way looked like: “back when I was at Workday, we had a 40-page Confluence document full of checklists that you had to go through” to get a service into production.

His view of Backstage is blunt. “Backstage is a framework for building a developer portal. It’s not a developer portal itself,” he said, which is why Roadie sells it ready to run, with upgrades and plugins handled for its customers.

Context for agents

Roadie now pitches its catalog as context for AI agents, packaging what an org knows about its services into what Tuite calls “context bundles.” He says the shift has reached his own work: “I haven’t written a line of code in maybe three months or so, since Christmas, I would guess. Everything is produced by Claude.” His advice to platform teams starting a portal is simple: “Put your laptop away and go talk to your internal users.”