How to ultra-over-engineer a useless piece of software (or why human interaction is important)

#overengineering #useless #npm #package

^{(cover image: from here)}

This is the story of the of the most useless (may be) npm package. I am warning you that this will be a waste of time.

Why?

Whenever I wanted to setup a new project, I used to always run these commands:

npm init -y

And,

git init .
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"

So, I thought of automating it.

I thought of writing a tool (FML 🤦‍♂️!) that could execute a series of commands.

ENTER THE Uninit

This will basically read a json file that has a schema object. This schema object should have key-value pairs of schemas.

User can select a schema by passing a cli argument (-l) that points to the json file containing schemas as key-value pairs:

--skip-confirm=true option is passed. Otherwise, user has to confirm the execution of each task.

This is a sample schema object. Here, there are tasks that will run sequentially, when the schema is run:

This is how the tasks are run sequentially:

Observe the last task (no. 4). This task's command has placeholders

So, the tool will

Parse the command
Take the values for each of the placeholder from the user (you can see something like, "Value for placeholder_0" in the image)
Replace the placeholders with these values
Execute the replaced command (Here, git commit -m "This is commit header" -m "This is detailed commit descriptions")

Each schema has the folowing structure:

description(string): Describes the schema
tasks(Array<{name: string, command: string}>): name property is a unique id for this object task object. command is the command to execute. command can take user inputs. If there is any placeholder in the string(in this form: ${user_input_1}), then the tool will parse it and asks the user for input for each of the placeholder.