2015 Roundup - Inch: What a Year

This is the first part in a series discussing the projects that shaped “my” 2015.

I want to start this series with an article about Inch, a documentation analysis tool I started in January 2014.

For those who don’t know, Inch is an analysis tool to evaluate your project’s inline documentation and identify parts of your codebase that could benefit from better inline docs. Later in 2014 I also created a complementary CI service, Inch CI, which serves badges to put in your project’s README:

THE important Inch-related event this year was EuRuKo 2015 in Salzburg, where I gave my first-ever developer talk at a conference in front of ~650 people. Sharing a stage with Matz was clearly one hell of an experience and easily the most important moment in my open source “career” so far.

The overwhelmingly positive feedback I received for my work on Inch directly influenced my decision to stay in software (I am finishing my PhD in an unrelated field at the moment) and to create Credo, a project that takes Inch’s philosophy and applies it to conventional static code analysis.

Last year around this time, Inch CI served documentation badges for 500 projects on a daily basis. I am extremely proud to report that this number has more than tripled and stands at 1650 open source projects using the Inch CI badge. This is a testament to the fact that Ruby is alive and well, with the “Ruby underground” leading to new and exciting projects like ROM and Lotus.

I am also really happy about the 100 Elixir projects that joined in 2015. I am sure we will see more growth in this area in the coming year and that Elixir will be play an even bigger role in my life.

Consequently, the upcoming “Roundup 2015” post will be about ElixirStatus, a site I created last summer so that Alchemists around the world would have a place to post their new blog posts, projects and version updates.