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There was a time when a software release meant a gold master, a shrink-wrapped box, and maybe a launch party if the budget allowed. In October I tagged sixteen releases across ten repos — seven of them gh-observer alone — and the closest thing to cake was the Codecov bot welcoming itself onto my pull requests. I’ll take it. This is another in the series of monthly recaps of my public GitHub activity, numbers first with the stories behind the interesting bits. The previous installment covered September 2026, and the machinery that drafts these posts — a proper gh-recap skill — landed in this very repo in October, so the series now runs on rails instead of vibes. Whether that makes the posts better or merely more punctual remains an open question. ...

Back when I got started in open source, you mailed a patch to a mailing list, waited a week, and thanked your lucky stars if a human read it. In September 2026 I opened 200 pull requests, and I’m pretty sure I never waited a week for anything. Times change. Some of those PRs were even interesting, and one of them became a whole new project. This is another in a series of monthly recaps of my public GitHub activity — numbers first, with the stories behind the interesting bits. The series started with September 2025, back when the robots weren’t reviewing anything yet. They review everything now. Progress, I guess. ...

The July recap ended on a lighthouse note; August pivoted to something less glamorous and arguably more important: documentation. Also the daily data-bot PRs came back from their July vacation, so the robots are filing paperwork again. Everything is back to normal, where “normal” means I review a hundred-odd PRs a month and most of my code reviewers are machines. By the Numbers Metric Count Pull requests opened 113 … merged 112 … still open 1 … closed without merging 0 Issues opened (per my GitHub profile) 31 Commits (per my GitHub profile) 105 PR reviews given (per my GitHub profile) 107 Repos touched 26 Releases published 9 Bot-filed data updates 32 With the dailies back, the honest human-supervised count is 81. The busiest repos were data-curated (14), gh-observer (10), and chicks-home (7). Also on the board: github-readme-activity-graph picked up six PRs, because obviously my GitHub README needs a better graph of my GitHub activity, which is a sentence that says a lot about how I spend my time. ...

My journey of greeting strangers I’ve held onto a garbled memory of a passage in the first few pages of Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for the few decades since I read it: Roads free of drive-ins and billboards are better, roads where groves and meadows and orchards and lawns come almost to the shoulder, where kids wave to you when you ride by, where people look from their porches to see who it is, where when you stop to ask directions or information the answer tends to be longer than you want rather than short, where people ask where you’re from and how long you’ve been riding. ...

Another month, another pile of merged PRs to show for it. July’s headline stat is one I didn’t see coming: I gave 175 pull request reviews. Mind you, most of those reviews were of PRs written by robots, about changes suggested by robots. I’m not sure if I’m the manager or the middle manager at this point, but the org chart is definitely weird. By the Numbers Metric Count Pull requests opened 77 … merged 76 … still open 1 … closed without merging 0 Issues opened (per my GitHub profile) 9 Commits (per my GitHub profile) 113 PR reviews given (per my GitHub profile) 175 Repos touched 22 Releases published 7 Bot-filed data updates 0 Every PR this month had a human-shaped title — the daily data-bot took July off, so that 77 is all me, or at least all me-supervised. A 76-of-77 merge rate with the one holdout being a PR to somebody else’s repo says something about how agreeable my own repos are. The busiest repos were this website (13), data-curated (11 — mostly The Tower game data updates, because yes, I track a mobile game’s numbers like it’s my job), and my-user-manuals (10). ...

May was the quiet month that built a cluster. June was the loud month that shipped everything else. One hundred thirty-two pull requests, all one hundred thirty-two merged — the third perfect month of the year — and twenty-six releases. At one point homebrew-chicks shipped five releases in a single day. June did not dawdle. By the Numbers Metric Count Pull requests opened 132 … merged 132 … still open 0 … closed without merging 0 Issues opened (per my GitHub profile) 30 Commits (per my GitHub profile) 164 PR reviews given (per my GitHub profile) 99 Repos touched 23 Releases published 26 Bot-filed data updates 0 Twenty-six releases in one month is not a typo; it is a release cadence. gh-observer accounted for eight of them (v2.6 through v3.3 — yes, it crossed the v3.0 line in June), homebrew-chicks for six, and the rest of the fleet for the remainder. The busiest PR repos were template-repo (27), gh-observer (22), and data-curated (14). ...

My Qualifications Since this is my own blog I’m usually happy to avoid reminding you of how qualified I am. In this case it is easy to note that: I spent a dozen years teaching shell scripting on UNIX and Linux with materials that I wrote the majority of. The students were surprised and happy to have a teacher that had real industry experience. I’ve done 46+ code reviews for bash on Code Review StackExchange over the last decade. I’ve been a fan of bash and a detractor for csh and ksh for 30+ years. Terminology note For purposes of this article I’m going to talk about the “shell” referring to various shell implementations which traditionally end in “sh”. This excludes scripting languages such as Perl and Python. I’m not trying to say anything bad about Python here. There’s plenty of that already on the Internet. The most popular shells these days are bash, zsh, and fish. Most of what I’m going to say could apply to any of them, but some things will be specific to the Bourne Shell (/bin/sh) and compatible shells such as bash and ksh. ...

April was a perfect 123-for-123; May dialed the volume way down — sixty-three PRs, the quietest month of the year so far — and then quietly did something no month before it had done: stood up a Kubernetes cluster. Fewer pull requests, bigger leverage. That’s a trade I’d take every month. By the Numbers Metric Count Pull requests opened 63 … merged 61 … still open 0 … closed without merging 2 Issues opened (per my GitHub profile) 7 Commits (per my GitHub profile) 93 PR reviews given (per my GitHub profile) 137 Repos touched 16 Releases published 8 Bot-filed data updates 0 Yes, 137 PR reviews on 63 PRs opened — the review-to-authoring ratio is now officially robot-shaped, with Copilot suggesting and me adjudicating. The busiest repos were data-curated (10), www-chicks-net (9), and fini-infra (8). And eight releases in the “slow” month, because apparently even my off-months ship a release a week. ...

March launched gh-observer; April cleaned up after the party — and then, just to keep things interesting, landed a pull request in Hugo itself. The same Hugo that builds the site you’re reading. Some months the recursion comes to you. By the Numbers Metric Count Pull requests opened 123 … merged 123 … still open 0 … closed without merging 0 Issues opened (per my GitHub profile) 33 Commits (per my GitHub profile) 153 PR reviews given (per my GitHub profile) 84 Repos touched 24 Releases published 12 Bot-filed data updates 0 Second perfect merge month of the year — January went 130 for 130, April went 123 for 123. At this rate I’m either getting better at planning PRs or the reviewers are getting soft, and since most of the reviewers are robots I’m going to say it’s the planning. The busiest repo was gh-observer with 38 PRs in its post-launch polish phase. ...

There’s a tremendous amount of hype and hate around AI these days. Most techies seem to be on the hype side and most normies are on the hate side. Everybody has “good enough” reasons for their takes on this. Nobody is obviously wrong. I don’t think the technology is far enough along that we can say it is clearly a net negative, like cryptocurrency has turned out to be, but the concerns that it could go that way are reasonable and we should not leave the risk abatement to the tech industry that has shown so little concern for its effects on our society. ...