text stringlengths 0 1.17k |
|---|
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Olivier Lacan:** The idea is that you can have it on your local machine even if you don't have a markdown parser; it'll look fine, and then it'll look even better on GitHub or on Bitbucket or anywhere because they will parse it, and you'll see it. |
Again and again, the idea is just try to keep it as accessible as possible. I don't wanna go talk about that right now, or I don't know if you guys wanna talk about right now, but that stems from kind of what my original open source -- I don't know, what's the religious thing where you just go convert people? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Evangelism. |
**Olivier Lacan:** Evangelism. My previous thing was Shields, and Shields was about GitHub metadata badges, and the idea was, again, keep things accessible, because there might be people who don't use your project who will see it and then just get turned off immediately because they don't know what it's about, what ver... |
The format you mentioned is Org-Mode, which I didn't know about before... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes, that's the one... So what was that? Did you dig into it more? |
**Olivier Lacan:** A little bit... Basically, it's -- in the Emacs community they use Org-Mode for stuff like this; they use Org-Mode for everything that I think is metadata about the open source project. I might be completely butchering this, but... This contributor talked about it... It's nice that the Emacs communit... |
What I'm trying to achieve is not to please everybody; it's this idea, I guess, that I take from the Ruby community, in a way (because I'm a Ruby developer), that it's great to have opinions, everybody, and I certainly have them, but right now we're in a state that's not good, I think... And I think first we should ach... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I like the naming, but you know... |
**Jerod Santo:** There's lots of projects that don't have any changelog whatsoever, so something would be a huge step up, right? |
**Olivier Lacan:** \[27:54\] Right. So what I encourage listeners to do is basically what I've been starting to do in the last few months - I've put this page up and I've used this page as argument bullets to go inside of a project that I use. Basically, when I do an upgrade, there's a shock and I don't know why someth... |
I think one of the contributors for Discourse, a really great British guy... I can't remember his name. But yeah, if you go to Discourse, they use something to -- rack-mini-profiler. It's this really cool profiling thing that you can use in Ruby apps. Sam Saffron. And his changelog was strange, because it was backwards... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[laughs\] A little jab there... |
**Olivier Lacan:** Yeah. But again, he's an amazing contributor, but because of his cultural background... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's that one thing, the date - you just can't like it because of that? |
**Olivier Lacan:** Yeah, but it's not just that; it was more stuff. So if you look at the history of that file, you see kind of the -- what I'm trying to do first is reorganize and use markdown. And people get hung up about markdown, but markdown, as you said, is accessible... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's very portable, yeah... |
**Olivier Lacan:** Right. You don't need to know markdown to understand what markdown is about. And then the chronological thing was the second thing. So basically, I'm gonna use this as a template for how you would improve an existing changelog and/or create a new one. |
I'm trying to create one for a Rails gem called Strong Parameters, which is hugely important to anyone who's using older versions of Rails than the current one, and sadly, it's very hard to find out what was added to this stuff; some of it really is, again, crucial, because if you don't know exactly the difference betw... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What are the other culprits of frustration? In your notes, or at least on the homepage of Keep a Changelog you've got dumping a diff, you've got these kind of lazy ways to do a changelog, but not do a changelog, that sort of upsets everyone... So what are some of the ones that really get you angry? |
**Olivier Lacan:** So the one thing if you ever do a changelog - having a section about Added and Removed is fine. If you ever make a backward-compatible change and you don't put it in your changelog -- that should just be the only thing you put there. So really, if you hate changelogs and you think I'm silly, just put... |
So if you're going to change your public API so radically, just make a little line that says "Okay, now this doesn't work. You have to use this." That's it. That's the only thing I'm asking. |
Again, a huge generator of heat and rage in the open source world is that - breaking the API. And you're like, "Oh, there's a new version of this thing! Let's upgrade!" and then you turn into Adam, you just get really sad and bitter about upgrading... Which is what happened to me. Everything I've contributed for this, ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And that whole little kind of... for the listeners, about 4 or 5 minutes back you mentioned Shields, which -- Chad Whitacre has been on the show before; I saw you all do a virtual high five whenever that moved over to Badges... That was super-cool. So that's a cool project, just for one, so just to ... |
**Olivier Lacan:** \[laughs\] Okay, I'm gonna steal that, because that's a really good description. |
**Jerod Santo:** New tagline. |
**Olivier Lacan:** I have a blog post that I wrote about this called "An open source rage diamond", and that's exactly what it's talking about. I like that we went there, because Shields is exactly the response to "Why is everybody doing it wrong?" So you can rant about it and make a blog post first, and be on Hacker N... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Because it didn't have any other additional info? |
**Olivier Lacan:** No. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, that's not a badge, that's marketing. |
**Olivier Lacan:** Yeah, right... Which I can sort of understand; you're trying to market your business. But... It's kind of like the PHPBB Signature era, you know? Like, "Let's put animated GIFs in all our readmes, so that it's all flashing! Super-cool!" |
**Jerod Santo:** That sounds pretty awesome to me. |
**Olivier Lacan:** No. No, no, no. Stop it. \[laughter\] |
**Jerod Santo:** "Let's get them into our changelogs!" |
**Olivier Lacan:** People have done that though. It's kind of funny when you put one GIF, and it's just... Okay. You see it at the bottom and it's really funny. |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, maybe one GIF per release? Can we get that going? |
**Olivier Lacan:** \[laughs\] I think you should make one GIF per release for the emotion the release is supposed to instill in people. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes, that's good. |
**Jerod Santo:** There you go. |
**Olivier Lacan:** So there you go. Jerod, that should be your thing. |
**Jerod Santo:** I'll open a pull request on your changelog... |
**Olivier Lacan:** Crap, we're live... Somebody will probably register that website. \[laughter\] So basically, I just made a template. I just made a simple template. The idea of Shields is simple. It's called Shields because of one of the best TV shows of all time, The Shield. You should watch that, by the way, as a s... |
The key is "What is it about?" and then the value is - a simple example is "Build - passing or failing." "Dependencies - up to date, or not up to date." "Gem version - what is the gem version?" Code Climate chose this. I've actually talked to Bryan Helmkamp from Code Climate and a bunch of people from other third-party... |
So you end up getting in touch with all these really great people who just meant to do well, but either didn't have the graphic skills to make a badge that looks exactly the same as -- I think the Travis badge was the first... |
\[36:07\] So I made this thing and I talked to the Travis people and I talked to the Code Climate people and a bunch of other people (Gemnasium was really cool, too) and I said "Okay, how about we make badges for you and they're all consistent, similar color tones and similar font, and the font is more legible, so peop... |
People started using the original PNG version of those badges all over the place, even before we actually had figured out a sustainable way to make them... So it was just me and my friend, Nick Acker, just making them manually, or generating them manually for everybody... Which ended up taking a lot of time. |
**Jerod Santo:** But it's a success story nonetheless, right? |
**Olivier Lacan:** And eventually open source did its magic after a year... A few people created APIs; I think we had a Go API, we have a Node.js API, we had a Ruby API to generate them on the fly... And this is what Shields.io is. If you go to Shields.io, you'll see tons of examples of things you can just simply pass ... |
And what's even greater is that you can do that for your license. You can show easily what your license is, how you take donations for your open source projects (if you do), and then finally, they're all SVGs - so they're scalable, they work great, you can zoom it, they're easy to update... So yeah. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.