Adding a Spell Checker to a Jekyll Blog

Should you work on week-ends? tl;dr Only 2% of my paid work was accomplished on weekends, which matches my opinion that you should not. Collecting Data First, let’s try to use data and find out whether I actually work on week-ends. I’ve contributed to the open-source OpenSearch since 2021 as part of my day job, so I tried looking through my...

Most paying customers expect a certain level of (paid) support. One opens a ticket, gets a response, and any issue can be resolved. How does “support” work in open-source? My rule of thumb is to meet users where they are. GitHub projects have issues, but opening an issue to ask a question is generally frowned upon. Therefore, in JNA, we have a...

Since my first day in AWS 5 1/2 years ago, I’ve been experimenting with keeping a CHANGELOG of everything I do, available for everyone at the company to see. I wrote about it here. If you work at AWS, use the URL in the screenshot below to find it. I wrote a little script to try and classify where I spent my time. Here are some quick, very...

Have you watched The IT Crowd? It’s a hilarious British television sitcom from around 2006 that cast a bunch of IT geniuses at the Reynholm Industries tech support department in London. One of the signature laughs is that every time the phone rang, Roy would pick it up and without waiting say “Have you turned it off and on again?”, then hang up....

Every active open-source project grows a lot of low hanging fruit. Encouraging project users to harvest some of the yield can be a great way to engage and retain new contributors. Here are some ideas, mostly borrowed from Barani, for low-hanging work items that you can propose to anyone engaging in your project. Help Wanted, Good First Issue and...