Hi. I’m Jesse. I’ve been writing this Bops app for a while now, with the generous help of a great group of beta testers. While it’s still a bit rough around the edges, I’m really starting to enjoy using it. As I share it with more people I thought it’d be fun to write a bit about the changes and improvements I make. So; here we are.

To make sharing updates about development easier, I’ve automated a bit of the process in a way I find to be quite natural and useful. Here’s how my normal dev flow works:

  • As I build new features or fix bugs, I open PRs on GitHub. I feel PRs are the most natural expression of the software development lifecycle, so all of my software automation is built around them.
  • As I’m working towards completion of these PRs, I craft their titles them titles that are descriptive of the changes they contain from the perspective of the user.
  • I merge pull requests when they’re ready for use in an alpha test group; myself, my personal devices, and devices around my house.
  • On merge to main, a PR is created/updated with an automatically generated changelog.
  • When this PR is merged, a new version of the app is built and uploaded to TestFlight for beta testing.
  • At the same time a release is created, a PR is opened with the release notes for the new version. This PR is automatically generated from the changelog in the previous step.
  • I review the release notes and edit them to be more specific about the changes in the release.
  • I merge the release notes PR, which automatically publishes the release notes to this site.

That’s it. Updating automatically-generated release notes with something more specific now results in a blog post. Hope you enjoy! 🚀