Pattern Idea: Scripts To Rule Them All

Pattern idea: Enable contributions in polyglot environments with "Scripts To Rule Them All"

Many companies have a polyglot environment, using multiple different programming languages for the software that they build. The different programming ecosystems come with various ways of bootstrapping the project locally. That means that getting from git clone to an up-and-running project in a development environment works very differently, depending on the programming ecosystem.

Hypothesis

Making it easy to bootstrap a project will encourage contributions from a wider range of contributors, even if they don't know the specific programming language that well.

Examples in the wild

The GitHub team has written about this idea here:
https://github.blog/2015-06-30-scripts-to-rule-them-all/
https://github.com/github/scripts-to-rule-them-all

How to write the pattern

One approach for writing this pattern could be to find somebody that works at GitHub and is familiar with the Scripts To Rule Them All approach. Interview them and write a pattern about this approach together with them.

Other references

Also see this discussion in the InnerSource Commons Slack about the "impact of choice of programming language for the success of an InnerSource project":
https://innersourcecommons.slack.com/archives/C04PXKRN4/p1589456355371100

(link doesn't work anymore because we cannot go that far back in the Slack history)

Start with the linked GitHub article and the github/scripts-to-rule-them-all repository to understand the proposed pattern. Interview someone familiar with the approach, then document how it supports bootstrapping polyglot projects; done means a complete, reviewable pattern based on that input.