Last month GitHub introduced issue and pull request templates in response to the “Dear GitHub” letter of complaints from open source project maintainers. The new templates let maintainers streamline contributions to be more structured and meaningful for the project.
Creating issue and pull request templates could be a boring addition to your project’s task list, or you can have a little fun with Tal Ater‘s new open source template generator. It leads you on a whimsical journey inspired by Lewis Carroll and H.P. Lovecraft while creating templates for your project.
The generator lets you build your templates in the style of a Choose Your Own Adventure book. At every step you make selections that will help structure the final templates. For example, you can choose whether or not to focus on bug reports, or prioritize new features/improvements, or make room for both in your issues template.
In a post titled “Learn to Ship Faster by Embracing Ridiculousness,” Ater explains how he built the project over three days as an exercise to help him learn to let go and ship imperfect products:
The project’s own imperfections are by definition its greatest strengths. Is it user friendly? About as friendly as a mad hatter. Does the writing make sense? Absolutely not. Did I get it from idea to shipping in 3 days? Abso-freaking-lutely.
The result is a fun little time machine that transports you back to childhood while outputting some useful templates for your open source projects. They may require a bit of additional tweaking for your particular use, but Ater’s generator gives you an easy way to get started.