AllMyChanges Mission

When our project was just in its infancy, it was based on the hypothesis that for almost any library you can find changelog, and if you can’t find it, you can build it from commit messages. But the reality was not as rosy as we wanted: either the changelog file in some ugly format gets caught, then it ceases to be maintained, and the product, meanwhile, is developing, or something else. And then we realized that parsing the world is not enough, we need to change it.

Changing something in a jiffy is an unusually difficult task

Therefore, we do not set ourselves such a goal. The mission of AllMyChanges is to let developers around the world understand that ChangeLogthis is their way of interacting with the outside world, the same channel as a blog or twitter account. Before our service appeared, it was difficult to compare a simple ChangeLog with a blog, since there was no way to subscribe to updates. After all, the link to the rss blog feed can be thrown into the rss reader, you can subscribe to the social profile by following a person, and it was difficult to subscribe to the library changes.





Some developers, seeing this problem, are trying to build communication with users of their libraries or APIs using blogs. There they write about releases, sometimes they post seals and other news, maybe not directly related to releases. But few do this, since it’s very expensive to maintain a blog for each of its opensource libraries and, you must admit, it’s much easier to
add sections to a ChangeLog.mdfile and commit it to the repository.

GitHub, for its part, is also trying to give developers an interface for communication built around repositories. It's called GitHub Releases.. It works like this: you put the git tag with the version, then, instead of adding ChangeLog, go to the GitHub interface and append there a description of what happened for the release. To all this, you can attach some binary artifacts, for example, collected for different platforms. For releases made using GitHub Releases, an RSS feed is generated, there is no other way to subscribe to project news, with the exception of third-party services like Sibbell or AllMyChanges . True, Sibbel only works with GitHub Releases, and in AllMyChanges there is no such restriction, it works with any sources.

By the way, according to our estimates, about 10% of all projects that have been added to AllMyChanges already use the release service on the github. That is why, recently, we have supported GitHub Releases as another data source. They enter the narrow pipe on the right:

Communication is our everything.

A great need for a communication channel exists among API developers. Many of them do not want to admit this and hide in every possible way information about what and when they change in the API, but there are good guys who understand that only regular interaction with users allows you to build a healthy community of developers.

By the way, a similar situation is now in the mobile application market. Many companies now realize that release-noutts are an excellent communication channel and begin to use them for their intended purpose, not only transmitting important information about changes in the software, but also entertaining their users. See, for example, what Slack and Trello developers write .

So, the mission of AllMyChanges is to reduce the number of guys who write in their release notes: "This update includes minor improvements" and turn to the wall, falling asleep with a sense of accomplishment. Do not be among them, tell your users what is happening, encourage them to subscribe to the Chenglog updates on AllMyChanges .