Using Amazon Q Developer to help me open source my code

I am very passionate about open source, and spend a lot of time working with open source developers. As I explore the various projects that I come across, I notice that sometimes projects have missed out adding a LICENCE file (essential for a project to include to ensure that developers understand how they can use it and what their obligations are).

A less common thing I come across is the inclusion of machine readable data within the source code, that allows it to be analysed by tooling. Typically this might be to make it easier to determine licence and copyright details, or any other important meta data you want to present about your code. SPDX is a popular way of implementing this, and allows the expression of components, licenses, copyrights, security references and other metadata relating to your software. Its original purpose was to improve license compliance, and has since been expanded to facilitate additional use-cases, such as supply-chain transparency and security.

As a test, I wanted to see whether I could use Amazon Q Developer Agent for software development to automate this task for me. In the short video below, you can see how I use Amazon Q Developer to first help me better understand some open source licence questions I have, before I then ask it to generate the code needed to add these SPDX headers.

In this short post and video, I wanted to quickly share how Amazon Q Developer Agent for software development can automate tasks that you as a developer have to do. Through this simple example, I was able to get some helpful information about the different open source licences I could use, and then use Amazon Q Developer Agent for software development, to automate the rest.

Stay tuned for more adventures in Amazon Q Developer, and as always, I would love to hear your stories and what you are doing with Amazon Q Developer. Find more ways that Amazon Q Developer can help you by checking out the Developer Centre resources.