Have you ever had a third-party application or API change slip by unnoticed until it started impacting your production environment?

The process of monitoring change logs for the multitude of dependencies for modern projects is becoming an unmanageable mess. Providing a standardized, developer friendly method of distributing changelog is highly appealing.

Why am I doing this?

This project was born in my mind July 2017 when a change to a public API caused failure on multiple projects because we missed a change notification from the API developers.

The issue occurred because the registered user for the API was a client and not the development team, the change notification emails go to the registered users and there was, at that time, no way to register anyone else for notifications. Sadly this particular notification ended up in the junk box and was entirely missed until integrations started failing.

The only real solution around this at the time was to monitor the API developers website for change notifications, which is time prohibitive or requires some for of scraping to check for changes and then implementing your own notification system. Sadly this issue will have a slightly different shape for each API, component or product you integrate with.

I've noticed many other items that experience changes over time that may affect a user’s decision to use or continue to use a product or item. It goes well beyond the world of IT and API's.

The changelog.cl domain was registered shortly after the original issue, but sadly I haven't had time to pursue this project till now.

I’ve made some limited progress on a prototype CLI client based on a very rough draft of file and distribution “standards”.

Find the limited progress here: changelog.cl on GitHub