Detecting Inclusive Language in My Codebase with Sonatype Lift

This past Monday Sonatype employees around the world took the day off of work to reflect on the American holiday of Juneteenth. One of the discussions on our internal Slack was around the subject of inclusive language and its impact in the workplace. We concluded that continually reexamining our unconscious bias is key. This isn’t always easy especially when terms like “master” and “slave” have been baked into computer networking and architecture models for decades.

In recent years, GitHub took steps to remove some of these terms from the platform, specifically renaming the default branch to “main”. But surely there’s more we can do to help eradicate the use of non-inclusive terms from the software industry.

This week I had a chance to play around with Lift’s extensibility API to address just this issue. This feature allows me to add custom static analysis tools to run on my GitHub pull requests. I found an open-source tool written by an engineer at DataDog: Woke. Woke is a linting tool that searches code bases for language that is not inclusive.

The Lift documentation provides a really simple set of functions that need to be defined to add a custom tool:

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• version: Returns the version of the tool.
• applicable: Determines if the custom tool should be run on this particular code base. For example, some tools may apply only to specific programming languages.
• run: Analyzes the code base and returns any findings in the form of the following JSON object:

Using these guidelines, I wrote a simple script that downloads the Woke project, runs it on the current repository, and converts the output to Lift consumable JSON. When I ran (Read more...)