Getting To Know Our Readify Consultants. Episode 01. Jake Ginnivan

Getting to know our Readify Consultants

Jake Ginnivan is a Senior Consultant at Readify. He's an open source enthusiast, blogger, speaker, microsoft MVP and a fan of good beer. He is a contributor to a number of open source projects including AutoMapper, Shouldly, NSubstitute, XBehave, DbUp and Funnelweb. The best way to get in touch with Jake is to flick him a tweet. Today I gave him a call to talk about his latest efforts on a project called GitVersion. GitVersion is an Easy Semantic Versioning solution for projects using Git. We started the conversation by taking a quick look at what Semantic Version. Jake is taking the lead on the next release of GitVersion. To give you some background. GitVersion has been on GitHub since August 2013. Since then it's had 22 releases with 54 contributors and it's used by the team NServiceBus and Octopus Deploy. I got to using GitVersion on a project this week and I found it interesting to see how many different ways it can be used for different solutions. GitVersion works on many levels. It can assess your commit messages, tags and branches. It gathers up all that data and creates a useful version number. Depending on your configuration it will then include that version number in your solution. GitVersion is useful for whatever pipeline you've got going on. Whether it be Team City, Visual Studio Team Services, Chef, Puppet, Octopus Deploy. It's going to work because at the end of the day it can be encapsulated into a single simple to use command line tool that can be plugged in whereever you like. GitVersion is a tool that will help your project remain semver compliant. Thinking about what this means and how this sort of standardisation can help your project continue to evolve whilst others depend upon it got me thinking... Spending some time exploring semver has got me thinking about transitive dependencies and how this sort of idea is often at the core of backlog management, grooming and prioritisation. Perhaps semver could be a useful tool early in the scrum cadence. Perhaps the idea of semver could be useful for versioning many things, not just released packages of code.