I worked on a product with a microservice architecture for a while. As one does working in such an environment, I found myself creating a lot of little services. Each of these services was first described as a service in a protobuf file. The services were compiled into an interface which you would then implement. We also used a tool for injecting dependencies to make creating these services easier.
This is a long way for me to say that to start a new project, I would generally have to create three files in different (new) directories. Like any self-respecting developer, I would hunt down one such file, create the new directory, copy an existing file to the new directory, do some deletion and substitions and work my way to the next file until I was done. This process felt hokey because it was; the developer experience was lacking.
At the time, I really wanted a code-generation tool that I could configure once for our project and then just call on the command line and have it create the file stubs in the right places, creating the new directories as appropriate, perhaps with the name of the new service and the usual imports already provided. I scoured the internet for such a tool, but couldn’t find one. I wanted to write it myself, but one doesn’t just have the time to create a tool that will likely cost you a day of work and only save you 5 minutes of time every couple of weeks.. well, maybe you do, but this was a seed stage company and we were focused on shipping, not solving my ickies of copy/pasta work.
But then I found myself hacking a project of my own, this time also with protobufs, and having the same problem. This time however, I had time to spend on writing that tool to remove the drudgery and so I did. This became geniveev. I will let the repository readme describe the format of the configuration file and how to use it, but the result is that in my project (with the example configuration file in the repo) I can now run
geniveev service-stubs --service_name foo
This will create a stub foo protobuf file and its implementation file, creating the new directories in the correct spots for the project. My developer ickies are solved. Perhaps it could help you too.