Writing code is wonderful, but it gets its real value, when it's released and shipped to the world. You know the mantra: "Release early, release often".

Releasing code is not hard, but it involves a lot of details, and you want to get them right, because a release is this public statement "Hey, it's done, it works, you can use it." and you can't take a release back, once it's out there. To help with releases there are tons of release scripts which try to automate things. But they usually are quite fragile in case something goes wrong and a pain to test and maintain.

This Hack Week project is about changing this and solving the problem of release scripts once and for all.

The goal is to write a tool which automates releases for every thinkable project. It goes under the name Yes, Ship It!. There is code. Read more about the technical concept in the README.

You are welcome to contribute. Feedback, bug reports, patches, whatever helps to improve the tool.

I'm particularly interested in releases of your own projects you do during Hack Week. Maybe we can make yes_ship_it work for these. If you are interested in giving this a try, please let me know.

And wouldn't it be great to collect all the software releases we do at Hack Week at a central place? With yes_ship_it we could automate that.

Update: We are shipping! We have shipped the first releases as can be seen on our release tracker. The project is self-hosting now, it can ship itself. The next steps are to make it work for as many other projects as we can. Things to do are tracked on the project's issue tracker.