Maintenance Guide

Your Skill Card is a persistent digital protocol representing your professional identity. Just like a standard resume, it must be maintained, versioned, and audited over time. Because the Scoutica Protocol operates on raw file storage (JSON, YAML, Markdown), maintenance is entirely under your control.

1. Updating the CLI System

The Scoutica development team frequently releases updates to the CLI parser, JSON schemas (v1 -> v2), and AI Prompt parsing instructions to handle the latest edge cases from varying LLMs.

To forcefully update everything:

scoutica update

We recommend running this command before evaluating any massive CV overhauls, as the prompt extractors regularly receive buffs to output quality.

2. Maintaining your Profile State

Scoutica allows for atomic commits. You shouldn’t manually wipe profile.json to start over unless absolutely required. If you achieve a new certification or complete a new freelance project:

Option A: The AI Merge (Recommended)

You can append continuous documents to an existing card by simply targeting the same directory with scan. The intelligent AI engine will perform a diffing strategy and merge your new documents smoothly.

# Add new certificates you just downloaded
scoutica scan ~/Downloads/New_Certifications/ ./my-card/

Option B: Hand-coding Data

Because everything is strictly verified through standard UNIX tools (like Python JSON/YAML parsers), you can manually patch your profile anytime.

1. Open profile.json with an editor:

   code profile.json

2. Manually append your new job entry.
3. Validate locally to ensure you didn’t break the JSON structure:

   scoutica validate

3. Automating CI/CD Workflows

Since Scoutica simply checks standardized schemas and outputs static assets, you can heavily automate your professional identity.

GitHub Actions Use Case: If you host your card via a public GitHub repo (which is standard practice for the publish command), you can configure GitHub Actions to automatically run scoutica validate on each Pull Request. This strictly prevents malformed syntax from slipping into your live card URL before employers resolve it.

name: Scoutica Validation
on: [push, pull_request]
jobs:
  validate:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Install Scoutica
        run: curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/traylinx/scoutica-protocol/main/install.sh | bash
      - name: Validate Files
        run: |
          export PATH="$HOME/.scoutica/bin:$PATH"
          scoutica validate ./

4. Periodic Evidence Log Flushing

Your evidence.json tracks URLs and links simulating your “Portfolio”. Links die commonly over a multi-year career.

Maintenance routine:

1. Once every 6 months, verify the domains listed inside evidence.json are still resolving 200 OK.
2. If an employer completely took down the platform you built, rewrite your evidence log to point toward the WayBack Machine or a locally hosted screenshot.
3. Commit the changes and invoke scoutica publish.