Luke Collier

Software Engineer

Quickstarts

Reading time is 2 minutes

Getting a project up and running is a neccesary part of any opensource software, but more often then not we seem to not include the neccessary steps in our worklife repo's! How can we fix this? Here I will suggest some ideas for improving your teams code visibility in your organisation.

Quickstarts

By quickstart I specifically mean a header in a readme that details one or two commands to get your service running, quickstarts are wholly underated specifically for business development. If your project has a 12 step plan for how to get going chances are I won't contribute, open source figured this out years ago yet it's still rare in enterprise to find a well maintained README.md with projects! This could be down to enterprises tendancy to create 'product groups' a selection of teams that work on a singular product. These product teams don't foster collaboration easily as it's hard to get visibility on the great gizmos and gadets other teams are working on. But with most companies having some for of github, gitlab, gittea or even svn theres no excuse! Include a quick start and let other people play with your toys. This becomes business critical if you have an upstream dependency on another team and they've all come down with a bad case of not-at-work-itous struggling to read through your 12 step guide to get the first service can cost money.

Make your projects as easy to develop as you can they're are many tools to help with this, from docker-compose to yarn we've very little excuses nowadays for a manual setup.