Improve package meta (documentation, typing, etc)

[wfordh]

I think it'd be worthwhile to get the package polished up to help it stand out on pypi and make it easier to use, mainly with things like documentation, typing, testing, and linting. I was inspired by this blog post on Tubthumper, another open source repo. I wanted to open this issue to start the high level discussion on these potential additions, but am happy to split it out.

• Documentation: stretch goal is move to readthedocs / sphinx and easier goal is to move to markdown files within a docs folder in the repo. Either way making sure the docstrings are helpful as we're currently pretty inconsistent there, though a lot of the functions are pretty self-explanatory.
• Typing: stretch goal is to go all the way to mypy or another static type checker and easier goal is to just have the type hints in the code without checking them. I think this would help with usage and documentation. It might depend on which Python versions are supported / what the code is written in. I think it's currently 3.7?
• Versions: stretch goal is to support 3.7 through 3.10 and have the tests and everything configured to support / validate each version.
• Testing: Not entirely sure here but I guess have unit tests and maybe some code coverage tests?
• Linting: adding black (or something else?) and isort to keep the code clean.
• pyproject.toml: probably want to replace setup.py with pyproject.toml to keep with Python best practices

I'm by no means an expert here and it would be my first time figure out a bunch of these things, but think it'd be pretty cool. I might have some time in the next couple months to work on it, too. LMK your thoughts @dtsong

[dtsong]

@wfordh, likewise it would be my first time figuring some of this out too. Good call on raising these in a high level issue for the discussion. I'll split a couple issues out to allow for focused discussion on the raised topics!

[wfordh]

Sounds good, guess we can figure it out together! Another thing that's less high level that I think would be good is adding a __repr__() (or is it __str__() that we'd want?) method to each class to make printing the objects easier. I think I'll have time over the next few weeks to work on things. Happy to prioritize these things however it makes sense.

It also might be overkill, but we could start up a Discord server or something to make communication easier.

[wfordh]

Discord server https://discord.gg/NaX8GQkJ

[dtsong]

Sure let's do that, @wfordh !

[dtsong]

@wfordh , feel free to email me a link to join, think the above link is expired.