Background
When starting a new coding project, it can be difficult to know how to follow best practices for the given language or framework one is using. A developer may wonder, for instance, what the file structure should be or how best to configure CI systems and other tooling. A project which attempts to improve this situation for MATLAB users is matlab-repo-init, a GitHub template repository for the MATLAB language. To use it for a new project, the developer first needs to make a fork of the repository (by clicking the "Use this template" button), then, after cloning this new repository, run a configuration script to initialise the project.
Our Contribution
We were contacted by the researcher behind this template as part of our Open Source Booster programme and asked to perform a general audit as well as to help with some specific tasks. We were able to implement various new features, most of which related to continuous integration (CI). For example, we introduced GitHub Actions workflows for spellchecking and linting documentation as well as automatically synchronising the repository with its mirror on the Imperial College London GitHub organisation. We also made numerous other suggestions as part of our audit (such as to report MATLAB warnings via another workflow), many of which the author has implemented since.
Outcomes
This work will have impact for users of this template as they will now have better linting out of the box via GitHub Actions, which will hopefully improve the quality of software using it. In addition, we hope that as a result of our consultation the author will be more confident in implementing additional, similar functionality in future.