Telestion: ground station software in a few lines

The challenge

Ground station and mission control software is about as complex as domains get: live telemetry, many services, hardware at the other end and a mission at stake.

What I did

I led Telestion's developer experience end to end. The goal was simple to state: keep the domain's complexity out of the developer's way.

• API design, so that everyday tasks read as short, plain code
• Docs and quickstart, from the first steps to the reference
• Examples and samples developers can copy and build on
• Tooling and onboarding for new team members and users
• YouTube videos about the framework

The result

A service that watches telemetry and raises a warning reads like this:

const { messageBus } = await startService();

const telemetry = messageBus.subscribe('telemetry');

for await (let packet of telemetry) {
    const data = telemetrySchema.parse(packet);
    if (data.altitude < 10_000) {
        sendWarning(`Low Altitude: ${data.altitude}`);
    }
}

Sample from telestion.wuespace.de.

That's what good developer experience looks like from the outside: you read the code and understand it, without learning the whole framework first.