Company
Date Published
Author
Lorna Mitchell
Word count
627
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

At Nexmo, we love sharing code with our developer communities. Usually, this means publishing to a git repo on GitHub so that any developer that wants to use the code can go ahead and do so. We realized though that now we have around 300 repositories between a few different GitHub organizations, it can be tricky to find what you need and also to understand how to use each project unless there are good instructions. To make the Developer Experience even better for everyone, we created and then publicly shared our Repository Standards. We recognized three types of project that we publish often and adjusted our guidelines for each type, including SDKs, demo applications, and other types of projects. We took particular care with installation instructions and licensing to ensure community can build on our SDKs with confidence. Having a clear statement of the features and purpose of the project is really important in a repository like this. We also worked on licensing and on including either docker setups or "click to deploy" buttons to allow users to try out what we had made for them. The goal was to capture a shared checklist of things we think are important when we publish a repository, making it easier for developers to find our projects on GitHub. We started with a basic README template and guidelines, including a checklist, to remind us to link to developer documentation and tell users how to get in touch if they needed to. The details here are small things, but they do matter, helping to orientate developers on where they are, what this repository is about, and where they might go next.