The process of Blueprinting

Blueprint (noun): The project which aims to make it easier to build external apps backed by Kraken

Blueprint, Blueprinting (verb): The process of documenting Kraken APIs alongside demos and providing utilities to easily stand up a functional feature in an app (like a consumer site)

Hello and welcome back to the Blueprint blog! It's been a very exciting month for the team - we've released our first package into the @krakentech organisation - @krakentech/blueprint-utils. This means we can start sharing more than just API examples and UI demos, we can start to export real utilities that make it even easier to "Blueprint" features in your existing apps.

Internally we've reached another key milestone - we've reworked our authentication approach to use API routes and middleware, which we are aiming to add to our new @krakentech/blueprint-utils package. To learn more about the approach to managing authentication, please see our Authentication Guide. We're aiming to offer an upgrade path to previous Blueprint projects to adopt more of our new stack, and the features that come with it, without having to do a full replacement of Apollo Client. Stay tuned for future updates!

Finally we want to give a very quick overview of our process of "Blueprinting". We aim to provide functional API documentation and working examples of how to write front ends for a Kraken instance. We concentrate on core-first features, with high demand and high impact. This generally takes the form of self-serve features for customers that help businesses using Kraken to operate at scale. The way we approach this is:

1. We'll use the APIs available to work out a sensible demo of a self-serve process.
2. We add those APIs to our Storybook, along with mocked responses and simple instructions, and check this with the relevant Kraken product team.
3. We build a functional example of this feature into our demo app. That feature then becomes available to test in any Blueprint deployment.
4. We generate Storybook stories for the relevant pages and add these to our core features section (with the relevant APIs).

Here are a couple of early looks at some features that have reached the end of Stage 2.

• Creating a Goods purchase for a Marketplace product
• Creating and accepting Goods quotes in a custom market
• Smartflex Onboarding

Thanks for reading, we'll be back with another update soon!