Gwyn Uttmark
Gwyn Uttmark serves at Colorado State University and has more than a decade of expertise in open-source scientific software development. Gwyn currently works with the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere to make the US Navy-born GeoIPS an accessible and effective platform for open-source development communities and academic researchers.
Session
Nobody loves writing release notes... and it only gets worse when multiple institutions are editing the same file. We learned the hard way that using a single file, manual RST editing, and no validation leads to repeated merge conflicts every release cycle. In response, we built Brassy, a CLI tool that replaces single-file changelogs with per-change YAML files, assembles them into formatted release notes, and lints entries in CI. We also built PinkRST (an RST formatter) and a Python-based Sphinx build system to tie our large multi-institution and many repo software documentation together. This talk covers the tools, the integration, and what we learned about getting scientists to actually write documentation.