Git aliases: switch to mainster, etc

I was on episode 4 of the On The Board podcast: Taking on New Challenges. I’m never quite sure what parts of my experience people will be able to relate to, but it was a good chat with Jason and Michael about becoming a newb late in my career.

Something many people don’t realize is that I didn’t write the original coverage.py. It was written by Gareth Rees in 2001. I’ve been extending and maintaining it since 2004. This ancient history came up this week, so I grabbed the 2001 version from archive.org to keep it here for posterity.I already had a copy of Gareth’s original page about...

Zizmor is a new tool to check your GitHub action workflows for security concerns. I found it really helpful to lock down actions.Action workflows can be esoteric, and continuous integration is not everyone’s top concern, so it’s easy for them to have subtle flaws. A tool like zizmor is great for drawing attention to them.When I ran it, I had a...

I have two main approaches for producing changelogs, but both are based on the same principles: make it convenient for the author to create them, then make it possible to use the information automatically to benefit the readers.The first way is with a tool such as scriv, which I wrote, but which was inspired by previous similar tools like...

I playfully quipped about changelogs, and Sumana Harihareswara thoughtfully responded with Changelogs and Release Notes. I agree with her on some things, and disagree on others.My point with the meme was that people should put effort into a hand-crafted description of what has changed in each release of their product. It should be focused on...