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Maintaining open source is a noble, but can be time-consuming endeavor. It doesn't have to be, though. During Hacktoberfest 2020 I used one of my repositories to experiment with automation around contribution and maintenance of jsx-readme. This is what I learned.
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Semantic Release reads through the commit messages and figures out whether a new release is warranted (if at least one commit contains a new feature, a fix, or a breaking change) and which kind of version bump should happen. It also creates the changelog, commits all changed files into a release commit and tags the commit with the release version. Last but not least it releases to npm. All of this aided by a plethora of plugins.
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When writing an open source library, usually the hope is for others to use it. This requires a good external documentation. A good starting point is a README file with an example. But for most libraries you will need more. Unfortunately, documentation has the tendency of getting out-of-sync with the code it is describing quite quickly. And when maintaining an open-source repo, ideally you can make changes quickly without having to worry about documentation too much. So for jsx-readme, I used TypeDoc, a TypeScript documentation library based on the JSDoc standard (which also lead me to discover something about how React and JSX work together). This way, my documentation is next to the code:
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Another part of documentation is the changelog. To simplify processes here, I am using semantic versioning which means that I describe all changes in a machine-readable format in my commit messages. The big advantage is, that I do not need to maintain additional documentation: I create the changelog automatically based of the commits.
