Hello there. I’m Flavio from Cherry, and I’m going to show you how you can wage war against your technical debt in a single commit. (wow such a badass intro) 😎
First, go ahead and create your free account:
You'll be prompted with a GitHub OAuth page. Make sure you read and understand the information we're asking access to. If you agree, then accept it :)
Since this is your first time, you should see the onboarding page below, with a very clear step-by-step guide with ready-to-use command-line commands that could get you up and running in just about a minute:
Note that they're all ready to copy & paste into your terminal. It contains your real API key and all. Just go ahead and paste each of one these commands into your terminal.
And that's it! You're good to go. ⚡️
If you look inside your commit, you'll see that we're adding two files:
- a configuration file -> .cherry.js
- and a workflow file -> .github/workflows/cherry_push.yml
The configuration file is where you can set up new patterns. The things that you want to track. These are going to be used to scan your codebase, and submit the metrics to our servers, so you can compose your dashboards later on.
As for the workflow file, it's actually a GitHub Action that'll be run for every commit on your main branch. For each run, it'll use the config file to scan your codebase, track your metrics, and report the contributions from the current commit.
Put together, they completely automate the work of tracking your technical debt!
Now, one of the main things about Cherry is that you can get up and running in a sec, but you can also slowly customize your config file to track the most important metrics for you.
Out-of-the-box, you’ll get things such as the count of lines of code per programming language, which gets automatically tracked via one of the many plugins that we offer.
This is perfect, for instance, if you're migrating your codebase from JavaScript to TypeScript, so you can build your own percentage charts and keep track of how your migration evolves over time.
Of course, darling, from day one you won't have this beautiful hockey stick chart. It'll be up to you to work with your team to make the metrics move in the right direction. The great thing is, while you do it, Cherry will be there to capture the value of your work and support you and your team to show off your achievements.
NOTE: This section would be better off in a separate article and replaced here with instructions on how to backfill data. We already have a
cherry backfillcommand, so all it takes is to submit a nice PR with these changes :) https://github.com/cherrypush/cherry
I'm sure you're feeling motivated already. Pumped up. Ready to start contributing and make those charts look great. But I'm also sure you'll be better off if you work together with your development team.
Cherry makes it simple and safe for you to do so. Just head up to the Authorizations page and start sharing access with your teammates.
NOTE: We currently only allow you to add other already created users. It'd be a great feature to actually allow people to submit an invitation to an email and allow the invited person to sign up and access the project. The project is open-source and looking for contributors, so feel free to submit your PR :) https://github.com/cherrypush/cherry
Now, one of the main things about Cherry is that you can get up and running in a sec, but you can also slowly customize it to track what's most important for you.
Here's a non-exhaustive list of things that you might want to do next:
- Create a migration dashboard
- Recognize your Top Contributors, a.k.a. your Metric Champions 🏆
- Watch changes to critical metrics
- Block pull requests that introduce new occurrences of critical metrics
All and all, Cherry is a sharp knife better placed in the hands of well-rounded Engineer Managers and Lead Developers, so they can have a clear overview of their codebase, watch out for undesired patterns, and wage war agains their technical debt. ⚔️