Being on an absolutely empty floor of an NYC office on Christmas Eve making pour over coffee and working on self-directed things has a certain charm to it.

@willmcgugan.bsky.social we did it!

Got up at 5, braved traveling via O’Hare, and skidded home through a northern Michigan blizzard to make it in time for this shindig! Thankful for so much this year, too much to say here but it strikes me that I need to get better at writing them down.

The next big thing was the plugin system. Typer makes this part really nice, because everything in Typer is either a group or a leaf node—so a plugin can just expose a Typer app or root-level command(s) that get added to the CLI's root Typer app. It's Typer all the way down!

I also created an npm-like prompt to install newly-available versions to drive adoption further. With the metrics, I was able to see version adoption over time. Generally pretty good, but some clear stragglers! The upgrade prompting broke in one version, so I had to make the rounds with folks.

Early on I invested in metrics, exposing user commands to our logging system. This made it easy to understand real-world usage and I could reach out to folks proactively if they were doing funky things. This also helped me encourage people to upgrade who hadn't, driving adoption of new stuff.

Just about a year ago, I started building an internal development tool to codify some of our most repeatable practices.

The aim was to build something observable, composable, and intuitable, all without breaking the bank—we're a mid-sized non-profit at the end of the day.