Saying Goodbye to Typo CI

Yeah this seems like something better as a pre commit check, or as a run on save, the same way I might run go lint or gofmt, not after the code is in the repo but as I’m saving. The “not talking to the users” mistake can be super fatal in products like this.

I'd phrase it slightly differently. We can and should fix things in response to CI failures. The problem is more so the cost/value trade off for developers. The lower the perceived value is, the more good will that will be lost with developers for having to do another iteration to fix them. Integrating these into the developers workflow as early as possible, like rustfmt or gofmt, lowers the cost and developers are less likely to have a problem with it.

At this point, the main value of having something in CI is either for the reviewers to give them a sense of things, like coverage or to help enforce people are using those tools, which means it should ail CI.

I don't really follow this. Ideally, the spelling errors should fail the build and ordinarily I wouldn't expect PRs to be able to be merged with failing CI checks.

Presumably it's possible to suppress false positive typo reports too and flesh out a per-project dictionary to help all other developers?

This is something Pycharm catches as a warning in a manual inspection or automatically prior to a commit.

And while nice, the inspections often catch other more important code issues.

These are also generally highlighted with an indicator of some sort to catch as you’re working on the code.

Are pre-commit inspections / visual indicators not generally a part of most dev workflows?

I would think spelling would be a part of the most basic text editor / ide at this point.

I'd say the way to do it is to have a --check option which fails if things are misspelled. That can be run in CI to catch problems, and leaves the developer to fix it in their own way (pre commit hook/IDE integration/command line tool/ability to spell).

I had similarly negative experiences with the GitHub app marketplace. They wouldn't even let me list my app as an unverified listing! That's the lower tier which supposedly had no minimum user count but didn't allow payments.

My app was nonsensically rejected for not having enough users yet. Isn't the whole point of the marketplace to help obtain users? When I replied to appeal (directly quoting the no-minimum-user-count statement), I never received a response, and none of the ~dozen GitHub employees I know were either willing or able to help me.

I gave up on the marketplace and just wrote my own Stripe billing, but after two years my app still only barely breaks even on its infrastructure costs. I deeply regret wasting my time building a GitHub app.

Adding insult to injury: my GitHub app is a SaaS CI version of my open source CLI tool, which GitHub internally uses as a core infrastructure component for their DB schema management. 8 months after my GitHub app's launch, GitHub open sourced some Actions code which uses my open source CLI tool to substantially duplicate the purpose of my SaaS app, albeit in a less compelling way (their approach doesn't provide inline annotations, is much slower to execute, and involves contorting the CLI in unintended ways).

Now I keep getting support requests from random users who want help configuring GitHub's action, but don't want to consider ever paying for a simpler-to-install solution with more features. It's extremely demotivating.

> I wonder if this is consistent with what others have seen or if it's something unique to this project?

I've spoken to a few other GitHub app creators, it's a fairly common experience. I think GitHub Actions are kind of viewed as the preferred alternative by GitHub so that's what they're focusing on.

My 2 cents: I run Reviewable (https://reviewable.io), a reasonably successful app for GitHub. It precedes Marketplace so I handle billing directly with Stripe, but when Marketplace recently reduced their fees to 5% I looked into migrating there. The lack of developer control over subscriptions and the painfully long turnaround times with support to get some straightforward questions answered (3+ months!) convinced me that they're not serious about it. Anecdotally, I also heard that the discoverability boost from being listed on Marketplace isn't that big either.

Based on my research I wouldn't recommend using GitHub Marketplace in its current state.

I wrote a hack a while back which just extracted comments from various programming languages, and then I ran them through aspell manually.

End result was a minor update to git to fix a couple of typoes:

https://blog.steve.fi/i_m_a_bit_of_a_git__hacker__.html

Even in my own work I know my comments, and inline strings, often contain typos. It would be nice to have a dedicated tool for catching new additions in pull-requests, etc.

Thanks Maciej! :)

I love the social software podcast! It feels like I'm listening to real people building products, plus following along with Colleen Schnettler build her product has been really inspirational :D

It's got to - it's competing internally with Azure DevOps as well.

For me, it’s been the enterprise security features that for the most part aren’t covered by the API, and have decidedly limited docs. Very frustrating.

> even then typos in code aren't such a big deal

Maybe it was just me but at my last role, I worked on a piece of software with a typo that stuck out like a sore thumb but the cost was too high to ever fix it (impacted multiple products with independent schedules or were just being milked and had no staffing).

I also remember some bike shedding over a person using a British spelling for a word instead of the American. Some times linters are just nice for deciding minutia so people don't argue (see also formatters).

However, I fully admit, compared to a lot of other priorities in software, these are minor.

VSCode does have a spellchecker. I rely on it myself because my spelling is abysmal (despite the lack of trying).

I'm on mobile just now, so I can't give you the link or even the name right now, but there is a good spell checker extension available. I use it on Windows, but presume it works elsewhere too. IIRC, it was a little fiddly to setup (think I had to download spell check files separately), but it's been plain sailing after that.

I mainly use JetBrains Rider though, and that has really good spell checking support built-in. Something I really like about Rider's support is that, just like lining rules, you have the option of saving additional words at the "Team Shared" level, so the whole team can use the same extra dictionary words. The same function works in Visual Studio with ReSharper installed, and presumably it's available in all JetBrains IntelliJ-based IDEs.

In VSCode, I use https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=streetsi...

I also enable & use it with languages it doesn't really have proper support for (like sql and ruby) - just add words to the dictionary as they come up.

I'm thinking Heroku. The experiences I've heard from developers writing for them has been super positive.

Slack's is excellent, with its approval flow anyone can initiate.