In the age of LLMs, standardized repos for your codebases can really affect performance. Luckily, ChatGPT can one-shot generating these which is why the code is not provided. This is a public list of ideas to help brainstorm things you can do to standardize your repository format.

Imagine you were dropped in a huge repo which you now have to take ownership of the code. When you first do that, you can do as many small refactors as possible to clean up the code to a better state and then going into the refactors of substance.

If you think something should be on this list, please submit a PR to add it!

”You can not pay people enough to accurately review verbose code, and believe me we have tried”

• Some due who worked at Jane Street

Linters

• clang-tidy to lint your repos and automatically fix them
• clang-format to ensure code is formatted properly
• ruff format to format python code
• ruff check --fix to run a linter over your python code (add I to enable isort which is not enabled by default)
• use pyupgrade to modernize python definitions. This is something I would personally run manually, though
• Ensure consistency in your repo between .yaml and .yml

Python

• Replacing os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), "../param/State_Machine.yaml") with pathlib (need to ask ChatGPT to make a custom script for this one)
• Use vermin to determine if the minimum python version listed makes sense

C++

• Replacing #ifndef with #pragma once in all header file (yes, I know #pragma once is non-standard)

ROS Specific Advice

• Ensure a ROS packages’s name (defined in the package.xml) is the same as the folder name.
• Ensure all of your gtest test cases are of the format test_<test_case_name> instead of <test_case_name>_test.
• Ensure if a file contains class MyNode : public rclcpp::Node that it must end in _node
• Replacing this-> for the rclcpp core functions with a regex
  • create_subscription
  • create_publisher
  • get_clock
  • create_timer
  • get_logger
  • declare_parameter
• Use a CMakeLists toolchain instead of using --cmake-args for colcon
• Using the seconds utility function instead of doing bestpos_msg.header.stamp.sec + bestpos_msg.header.stamp.nanosec * 1e-9 you do rclcpp::Time(bestpos_msg.header.stamp).seconds();
• Replacing get_clock().now() with now()
• Replacing the .set__<var_name>() with = syntax
• Move inline definitions to out of line definitions

Bash

• Use set -euo pipefail in all your bash scripts
• Run find . -name '*.sh' -exec chmod +x {} + to ensure all bash scripts are executable in your git repo. Asking Chat to ensure they have a shebang before running the find command would also work

Docker

• Use a builder Dockerfile to minimize runtimes size
• Use read-only services when using Dockerfiles
• Add a .dockerignore since docker first creates a tar ball of the current directory before building your image (including .git folder by default)

General Code Cleanliness

• Make sure it is README.md instead of readme.md, README or something derivative
• Specify the language ```python` in markdown code blocks