We developers often find ourselves faced with a problem that seems general enough and common enough that someone else could have already developed a solution for it. The solutions for common general-purpose problems are good candidates for open sourcing because they do not represent core business values to keep them proprietary.
I recently open sourced an ESLint plugin for OkCupid called eslint-plugin-i18n-lingui. The plugin is an extension for ESLint’s core static code analysis rules that enforces localization best practices by catching and fixing errors during development. The best practice rules were inspired by the learning pains from our efforts to localize our website.
This post will discuss why we developed our own ESLint plugin, why we open sourced it, and the steps I took to open source a ESLint plugin.
Although this post will not discuss the localization best practices that eslint-plugin-i18n-lingui enforces or how to create an ESLint plugin, keep an eye out for future posts written specifically about these!
This post is part of the Web Developer Playbook series, which are created to provide examples, best practice, and suggestions for designing and building web services. I will be using libraries from the JavaScript ecosystem (e.g., Node.js, React.js) in all my examples.
