Math factoid of the day: 62

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 use a lot of git aliases because I work in the terminal and aliases give me short commands for common operations. They are defined in my global git config file and range from simple to powerful but twisty.First, some basic aliases for operations I do often:[alias] br = branch co = checkout sw = switch d = diff di = diff...

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...