Many of Rally Health's libraries need to work with JSON. However, we have found (through long painful experience) that letting those libraries use Play-Json puts us into a particular form of Dependency Hell: the libraries wind up dependent on a specific version of Play-Json, which means that upgrading Play requires upgrading much of our ecosystem, which is a hassle. We want to decouple our libraries from Play as much as possible, to reduce this friction.
So, we are encouraging libraries to make use of uPickle instead: it's popular, well-supported, and fast.
However, if we allowed libraries to simply pick random versions of uPickle, we'd be right back where we were with Play-Json: if different libraries used different versions, we could wind up with evictions and runtime collisions, since uPickle isn't shaded.
So this, weePickle, is a shaded fork of uPickle. It is hard-shaded (instead of using sbt-assembly or something like that) because uPickle includes macros with hard-coded paths, so automatic shading isn't likely to work correctly.