Participated in a hackathon

Nomad hack week!


Our CLI uses the standard go flag parser, which uses -foo style flags, instead of POSIX-style flags (--foo, -f). Why does this matter? Because, if you want verbose output, you not only need to type out -verbose (since it doesn't have a shorthand flag), you ALSO need to put it in the "correct" place, since you can't have optional flags after positional arguments. Easy to work around, but also frustrating since it deviates from what a lot of devs are familiar with, and also it's more work (I don't know about you, but I'm incredibly lazy).

Mission: enable POSIX-style flags, adding shorthands (hello, -v!), and make it backwards compatible, because the last thing we want is to break existing users' workflow.

Result: Surprisingly easy to enable POSIX-style flags! One changed import and a few added methods to make it compatible with the new interface and we were up and running. Backwards compatibility took more time but it's definitely doable without anything too complicated. Hoping we can get this on the official roadmap...