[HN Gopher] Show HN: Caribou - a GitHub app to help you manage t...
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Show HN: Caribou - a GitHub app to help you manage technical debt
Author : attasimo
Score : 33 points
Date : 2021-10-11 17:15 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hellocaribou.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hellocaribou.com)
| me_im_counting wrote:
| I looked through your site, and was a bit confused. How does this
| help you monitor technical debt specifically? This seems like
| traditional engineering issue tracking but I may be missing
| something.
| attasimo wrote:
| Thanks for your feedback! Caribou tracks files that match
| specific custom rules that you set. So you will need to set the
| rules to match the 'tech debt' in your codebase. Once you set
| these rules, Caribou will track the decrease/increase of this
| tech debt and who is contributing to this decrease/increase.
|
| For example, you are using a deprecated library in your
| codebase and you need migrate it to another library. The old
| library is considered tech debt. You can set a rule to monitor
| the usages of the old library in your codebase. As your team
| starts migrating from the old library to the new library,
| Caribou will detect these changes and will show you the
| progress in the dashboard together with information on who is
| contributing to this improvement.
|
| Does this make sense?
| 1123581321 wrote:
| I wasn't sure either. This page of the docs shows what you can
| track: https://www.hellocaribou.com/documentation/#types-of-
| migrati...
|
| Technical debt findable with those tools could be a less-than-
| ideal language choice, "fix this crap" comments, bad
| architecture identified by certain statements, etc. A
| traditional issue tracker would require identifying and marking
| those instances for refactor.
| attasimo wrote:
| Caribou helps software teams manage long-term technical
| migrations in their projects. For example migrating from one
| networking library to another or migrating a codebase from one
| programming language to another. These changes usually happen
| over a span of a few months and without any tooling, they can be
| difficult to manage. It's difficult to understand how much
| progress has been made, what is still left to do and who are the
| engineers helping move the migration forward. Caribou was built
| to solve these problems.
|
| So how does it work? In simple terms, Caribou is a Github
| application which, after configured, monitors all the changes in
| your repository and displays a dashboard with the progress of
| specific migrations along with who is contributing to these
| migrations. Caribou allows you to define all sorts of migrations
| using an easy-to-use rules engine; for example changing the
| project architecture, replacing a library or changing some coding
| conventions. You can get inspired by our examples in the docs
| section.
|
| Before building Caribou, we were working in a fast growing
| startup for a number of years. As part of managing our
| engineering teams, we wanted a way to see the technical
| improvements happening in the codebase and an easy way to
| recognise those engineers that work on these improvements.
| Unfortunately, we did not find anything that we could use off-
| the-shelf for this, and so we built Caribou!
|
| Caribou is currently in Beta and is available for free. Please go
| ahead and give it a try! Let us know what you think!
| [deleted]
| igetspam wrote:
| This seems very useful. Any plans to support other hosted git
| providers, like gitlab? I've been needing something like this
| for a while but we're not using GitHub. I could hack and slash
| my way to a bad looking version of something lol me this but
| your dashboards look good and I cannot be trusted with UI/UX.
| attasimo wrote:
| Thanks for your feedback! We are planning to add all the
| other popular git providers like gitlab, bitbucket etc. but
| we don't know exactly when. This will depend on the interest
| from our potential users, so if we see enough interest in
| Gitlab, we will do it soon :)
|
| Would you be using Caribou in a professional setting or for
| your personal projects? What migrations are you currently
| doing that Caribou can help you manage?
| igetspam wrote:
| Professional. We actually regularly run into the problem of
| where team A updates some chunk of code that is consumer by
| a dozen or more applications and we need to track the
| update status of various consumers. I literally had another
| argument about it today because there was a required change
| that was announced but multiple parties missed the update
| and have brolen development pipelines. Being able to
| identify those internal projects and their update status
| would be really great for us.
| lucasbirgha wrote:
| We are currently thinking about migrating our Android app to
| Jetpack Compose, so this tool might be useful in tracking that
| really looooong migration. What types of migrations does it
| support? Is it Android only? Does this work with open source
| repositories?
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(page generated 2021-10-11 23:02 UTC)