Review the dev environment of Sage-Bionetworks/schematic

[tschaffter]

One of my objectives is to improve the development environments of software developers at Sage by sharing my expertise in software architecture and development. A good first candidate is a repo with contributions from 2+ active developers and who use a programming language such as Python, Java or TypeScript (the programming languages I'm most experienced with). Milen took up the offer and asked me to review Sage-Bionetworks/schematic.

Possible improvements (June 2022)

• [ ] Uniformize developer experience using Visual Studio Code Dev Containers
• [ ] Automatically fix linter issues when saving Python files
• [ ] Enable developers to work on remote hosts (EC2) using VS Code and devcontainers
• [ ] Simplify installation & installation doc when using a devcontainer
• [ ] Simplify GitHub workflows using a devcontainer
• [ ] Speed up GitHub workflows using caching
• [ ] Move contribution guidelines to CONTRIBUTING.md
• [ ] Redirect to Sage Bionetworks' Code of Conduct
• [ ] Validate OpenAPI document
• [ ] Containerize the REST API service
• [ ] Prevent sensitive configuration values from being committed to GH
• [ ] Describe the components of this project
  • The README should describe whether this project is an app, library, API service, etc.
• [ ] Clarify how this project can be deployed and used
  • The README should describe how to start the app or a snippet of code that shows how to use this project (if it's a library).

[tschaffter]

Additional context:

Thomas:

Hi Milen, I had a quick look at Schematic repo. I identified a few improvements that could be applied to uniformize the developer experience and make development more efficient. If you want to learn more about each improvement, I'm happy to jump in a call. I can also convert this ticket "draft" into an actual ticket in the Schematic repo to open the conversation to other developers.

Milen:

Yes, please feel free to start the issue; if you can have the list formatted with checkboxes that would be great. I think some of the items may be applicable and some may not be at this time. This is probably an epic actually, and we’ll have to break down the different applicable options in their own issues that can be triaged across sprints.