Simplified Repository Management

[nnichols]

A lot of our recent time has been invested into the development experience of these repositories; however, a lot of our time was sunk into replicating and testing these changes on multiple repositories. Ultimately, this delayed enhancements to our actual offerings and limited the desire to improve toolings, since replicating the improvements was always considered a critical step in our definition of done. Github has allowed us to automate most of the tedious repository-level configuration, but we still experienced several large gaps.

Ultimately, we wanted three things:

1. A collection of developer tools, quality checks, and expectations that was uniform across every repository (within reason. For example, we don't require JVM-specific libraries to run clojurescript tests)
2. An easy way for us to replicate tooling updates and changes to our entire collection of libraries and internal applications
3. A collection of tools that would natively integrate with our project management tools (NPM and Leiningen) with minimal-to-no configuration

Therefore, we've created two new development tools to kick this initiative off:

1. lein-sealog, a Leiningen Plugin for Changelog generation and management (This was one of the largest manual efforts in maintenance)
2. rebroadcast, a single source of truth for our linter configurations, CI/CD jobs, community documents, and template files

We'll continue to improve these tools and build new ones to lower the maintenance burden on our end, but please feel free to try them out and see if they're patterns you'd like to adopt within your own organizations.

All the best,
Nick.