Five years of CPILint

[MortenWittrock]

On this day five years ago, I released the first version of CPILint on GitHub. I finished the latest version two days ago, so this feels like a good time to take a break, enjoy a piece of birthday cake, and look back at the project’s early days.

(The cake is a “Kagemand”, by the way, which translates literally to “Cake Man”. They’re served at birthday parties in Denmark, and they’re delicious 😋)

Version 1.0.0 came out on August 31st, 2019, but my earliest notes are from the autumn of 2018. They were jotted down between meetings during a visit to SAP in Walldorf. Seeing those notes today, I’m quite surprised how many of the early ideas eventually made their way into CPILint.

Reading the notes also reminded me that I originally used a different name: Flowmon. I think it was supposed to be a portmanteau of “iflow” and “monitor”, but it’s not a very good name, is it? I’m glad I changed it 😅

Even though I ended up writing CPILint in Java, I initially wanted to implement it in pure XSLT. I had a Schematron-like meta-programming approach in mind with a stylesheet compiling rules into another stylesheet, that would then transform an iflow’s internal XML format into compliance notifications.

I still have half a prototype, but the technique ultimately felt too limiting and I abandoned it. I still quite like the idea, though. It’s quirky and just a little chaotic 🙃 And it’s not a bad thing that it didn’t work out, by the way! On the contrary, one of the wonderful things about hobby projects is that they let you follow new ideas to interesting places and generally - in the words of Kurt Vonnegut - fart around.

The first time I showed CPILint in public was at SAP Inside Track Walldorf in January 2019. I managed to have a prototype working just in time for the event. Committing publicly to doing a live demo in front of a large group of people is quite motivating after all 🫠

SIT Walldorf was also the first time I got to show off the CPILint logo:

I was certain that someone would fairly quickly spot where the inspiration for the logo came from. However, five years later, no one has pointed out the connection. I’m a big fan of retro gaming, and the Atari 2600 console from 1977 is about as retro as it gets. This is the Asteroids game cartridge:

Look familiar? 😛 For the fifth anniversary I’ve made these logo stickers:

I’ll bring stickers with me to events in autumn, so if you’d like one, do come up and say hi!

Well, the “Kagemand” beckons, so let me wrap this up. Working on CPILint for the last five years has been so much fun, and I have no intention of stopping here! The list of features that I want to implement is still very long, and I’m excited to bring them to you in future releases.

Thank you for reading and thank you for supporting CPILint!