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Hey there,
Are you new to these parts of the internet? This blog will explain what Mixster really is and why this little corner of the web has become an indispensable part of who I am, what work I like to do, and how I have been contributing to open-source over the years.

Give it to me straight, what is Mixster?

Mixster is a docs initiative started by Vipul Gupta that enables startups, organizations, and companies to “right” their docs, engineering culture, & product experience. We do this by:

Becoming part of your engineering team

Our team understands your architecture, product decisions, and technical debt to accurately plan, draft and execute your documentation vision for products from scratch with minimal knowledge transfer or hand-holding needed.

How? It’s because Mixster is made of engineers, OSS maintainers and industry experts who love to create compelling documentation experiences.

Building the right culture in your team

Documentation is a living document. It needs a community to sustain both internally for a product or externally in open-source. Mixster provides a strong foundation from where you team can be enabled to write and maintain the docs as the product evolves.

Services: Writing culture processes, company handbook, friction logging, community outreach & developer advocacy, project maintenance and hiring.

Eliminate the need for docs

We want to focus on how docs no longer solves problems, but eliminates them for you. The lesser users needs your docs, the better your product is becoming.

We help you get there by identifying & even executing UX/DX, processes, infrastructure and code improvements.

Building GenAI docs & automations that actually help your customers.

And, that’s the elevator pitch for Mixster, the initiative by Vipul Gupta. I have availability in 2024 to take on more projects individually and our team will have time to take your idea further from 2024 Q3. We looking forward to working with you. You can use any of my contact details to reach out.

Mixster is also the name of my blog where I document a lot of my travel and work since 2017.

Our Way of Work

Since 2017, Mixster has played a pivotal role in unlocking developer velocity and reducing friction in the process through our solutions in docs, processes, culture and people.

Documentation should be a first class citizen. You can bank on us that documentation wouldn’t be the item holding you back. That’s why clear communication, alignment over goals and ownership is critical in our way of work following Conway’s law.

We practice radical candor with our clients to provide context, facts and data upfront for you to always make the right decisions. We constantly adapt to your needs, and bring our own brand of firestarter energy and ideas to the table to always keep things moving forward.

From research, to documentation design, to A/B testing to information flow to deployment to making it production-ready. In other words, we take up the heavy lifting of writing easily maintainable, scalable docs that your customers or stakeholders would love to read. Often ready to go the extra mile to ensure quality in whatever work we commit to do because the difference between good and great is a little extra magic.

The team you can trust

Mixster is a mix of SDEs, SREs, designers, entrepreneurs, and open-source veterans. People who have authored content with years of experience under their belt. With Mixster, you can effectively take the first step forward towards building a stronger community presence around your brand. We are committed to building inclusive, community-oriented, and gender-neutral focused.

Quite simply, we provide your venture with the very best of people, skills, and tools available in the market without the hassle of hiring your content team. Documentation written by developers and for developers. The way it should have always been.

Our Testimonials & Past Work

Docs is a niche problem cutting across verticals. It’s as important as a menu in a restaurant. Here’s our work across the kitchen.

Generative Onboarding guides to dynamically match user’s device + stack.

Eliminated over 2000 static pages, and 400+ screenshots when Getting Started guides for BalenaCloud were automatically generated from external sources with all dynamic pages.

As device support scales, new guides, and relevant screenshots get generated automatically on build time to keep documentation up to date.

Lindsey Rogerson,
Content Director, Metricfire

“It was great working with Mixster, they were very knowledgeable about a broad range of topics related to monitoring. They were always proactive about getting the right information about the products in our space, and writing articles that really help our readers engage with our products.” Check out our work

PyCon India, Content Lead

This was my way of paying it forward to the community as I volunteered to take charge of content team of India’s largest Python conference. With the conference moving virtual this year, we managed the blog & social media content + infra. With the help of several volunteers, we made the beautiful PyCon India Program Guide a reality for all the attendees. PyCon India is a grassroots volunteer-driven conference, & was my individual contribution to the team!

Azure Developer Stories Winner

Azure Developer Stories is a writing contest for professionals software engineers to write technical blogs about Azure’s many services. The contest attract hundreds of participants across the country and is a great way to compete among the best writing talent the industry has to offer. My projects using Azure functions, Immersive Reader, and App service have consistently helped folks build new solutions and learn more about these products.

Nishchit Dhanani & Shreya Ranpariya,
Founders of Firecamp.io

“We got a chance to work with Vipul when we took the decision to build the Firecamp docs from scratch and do it right. We were looking for someone with commitment and subject matter experience on across the stack. In the first meeting only, we found Vipul to be the goto person for technical documentation. He helped out through the journey from building, designing and writing the docs from scratch to taking challenge ahead on. All in all, we found him to be a domain expert in writing empathetic documentation. If you’re looking for someone to write your technical docs I’d say, don’t waste your time, just call this guy!”

Sharing what we know

We are quite active on sharing our insights and lessons learned through the work we do for open-source projects and clients. Check it all out below.

Here’s the Call to Action!

Are you releasing a product soon? Do your users have difficulties reading your product docs? Are you drowning in issues on your docs repo? Do you want to build a community sustainably around your product? Do you want build a tailor made technical content strategy from scratch? Then reach out, folks!

We love a chance to talk to you. Drop a message! or email.

Here’s our Origin Story

Mixster started in 2017, out of raw ideas for me to have my corner of the web. There I was, a freshman struggling to make something for myself. New concepts, and new rules in this strange new place were overwhelming. I knew I had to adapt, I knew I had to change. Hence I started looking for thoughts, inspiration, and ideas. And in this turmoil brewing inside, Mixster emerged.

Back in June ’17, I joined the Dgplug Summer Training which actually motivated me to write my thoughts. I remember when I first started writing on this blog, I had like 40 odd views on posts that I created. And now, I see Mixster realizing its full potential in the last year with thousands of dollars in revenue, 85k+ views, 200k impressions, & so many collaborations with our partners Insync, Metricfire, Hasura, and more. All that with little or no advertising, a free WordPress domain, and a steady following of the content I love to write. Something that has motivated me to go further and take the next crucial step on the journey with Mixster. To try and build something bigger, something that would be meaningful to the community.

Here comes the big news!

I am very excited to share the update that Mixster over the past year has grown into becoming a community of engineers, Sys-Admins, developers, designers, researchers, and scientists. People who come from all walks of life. People who are experts in their fields with a very special thing in common. They absolutely love to write documentation. Be it technical content of any kind, docs, articles, security reports, legal or blogs on topics they know, have worked on for years, and have loads of experience to show for it. Mixster is an initiative to give back to the community, contributing to some of the biggest open-source organizations.

That’s the pitch.

Mixster isn’t changing base or anything. It’s still going to be my corner of the web. It’s just that this corner is taking up an apartment with Humans of Mixster. One can call this a soft opening to grand new beginnings. If you are interested in making your documentation, blogs and any content whatsoever be and stay in the best shape it has ever been, I would love the opportunity to convince you how we can help your product reach that stage. After all, what’s more important than documentation in open-source.

Want to join Humans of Mixster?

Update: At this moment, we aren’t hiring any new writers for Humans of Mixster, but please do reach me on Twitter to submit your deets and we be in touch for sure.

If you like to write as well, we have plenty of work to go around. You can find me on Twitter or anywhere on the web by vipulgupta2048. Life with Mixster is one of freelance, remote, part-time and no commitments at all. I basically offer what I (myself) would like to see in a job. The perfect job. Humans of Mixster is an opportunity for awesome folks from the FOSS community to pursue their passion to write and take on challenging projects without the compromises and adjustments of freelancing alone. We have your back! If you are good, wanting to be great. Slide into my DM with the links of 3 of your best documentation/content.