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Andy Zhao (he/him) for The DEV Team

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New Project: Repo Recap!

As you may know, I've been writing periodic "Repo Recaps" for the work getting put into DEV by our team and contributing community members. The recaps are a quick summary of what is getting merged and shipped in our project. Transparency is great, but if our process is hidden away in commits and pull requests without context or curation, it's not reaching as many people as it could.

Since creating this recap was growing ever-more time-consuming, I began automating it. And now we are officially open-sourcing the script I created!

GitHub logo Zhao-Andy / repo-recap

Write your own repo recap for dev.to! Maintainer: @Zhao-Andy

Repo Recap

The Repo Recap Writer is a simple command line tool to help you write an automated summary of the latest pull requests and issues in your repository. It generates Markdown to be copy and pasted, and you can use that Markdown to publish a new post on dev.to.

Warning: 🚧 This is currently still a work in progress! 🚧

There's a lot of general purposing work to be done. This originally started as a bit of a side project, and most of it is built with hard-coded solutions. Since this was made by me (Andy Zhao) to automate my own workflow, you can also consider me the maintainer of this project.

Usage

This tool is essentially a command line tool/script, meant to be run locally. To get up and running:

  1. Clone the repository.
  2. Create two files in the folder:
  • environment.rb: This is where you store…

The script included is still very much related to my personal process, but we think by opening this up we could extend this for re-use on other projects and add functionality that automates more of this in more clever ways.

Any pull requests or issues are welcome in terms of cleaning code, pitching UX improvements, adding functionality, etc.

Thanks a lot, and happy coding!

Latest comments (5)

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dance2die profile image
Sung M. Kim

Andy, you are soooo lazy (in a good way 😉)

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nickytonline profile image
Nick Taylor

Nice work Andy! 🔥

Jesse Pinkman clip from Breaking Bad

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jess profile image
Jess Lee

This is awesome, Andy. Admittedly, I wasn't really sure what you meant when you said part of the repo recap process was 'automated' but now I get it! I think this tool can eventually be super helpful for other projects to update their community too!

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andy profile image
Andy Zhao (he/him)

Big shout-out to @ben for the initial idea of making this an open source project, and being generally helpful and supportive along the way! 🙌

Stay tuned this Friday for the next Repo Recap!

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I'm excited about this. I want us to push the use cases on the site for stuff like this.

I think in the future we could have "bot accounts" which publish useful stuff and can be followed like any other use account. They might not create the great unique writing of humans, but if you want to keep up with a project within DEV, it could be a great use case. So this could be extended to fit right into that idea.

I meant to write this on @owenconti 's post but forgot, so I'll tag him now:

I think the same sort of thing could be tied to releases/changelogs etc. Anybody who wants to integrate with our beta publishing API in interesting ways can be our guest! (explicit bot accounts are not a thing, but I'd like to explore that if anyone wants to pitch an initial use case and we can make it a thing soon enough if someone wants to make use of it)

dev.to/api