Posts

September’s recap opened the series with 144 PRs and a 97% merge rate. October decided to show off: 108 pull requests opened, 108 merged, zero left open, zero closed. A perfect month — the first of what would become a running tradition. And buried in there is my favorite oddball project of the fall: running a fifty-year-old book through my modern PR workflow, one chapter at a time. By the Numbers Metric Count Pull requests opened 108 … merged 108 … still open 0 … closed without merging 0 Issues opened (per my GitHub profile) 4 Commits (per my GitHub profile) 117 PR reviews given (per my GitHub profile) 0 Repos touched 15 Releases published 1 Bot-filed data updates 0 The busiest repos were this website (24), fini-infra (23), and mythical_person_month (22). That middle number is the tell: October was infrastructure month, with the CDN and tfstate work generating the two longest review threads of the fall. And the mythical_person_month number is the oddball — more on that below. ...

Introduction I really enjoyed reading The evolution of Lua, continued that I learned about thanks to this Hacker News thread. This is a great perspective on the long-term (15 year) evolution of the Lua programming language. While discussing language evolution is not completely unheard of, it is rather atypical of the discussion we usually have around programming languages. Most often you’re only concerned about the syntax or features of a particular language version, usually the latest one. Sometimes you might look at release notes to see when a feature was introduced or a bug was fixed. Our day to day needs don’t often benefit from a longer term perspective. ...

Is anyone in my network looking for work these days? One of our family members works at Vocal Media. They’ve been very happy with their role, so I hope this Senior Software Engineer role could be worth your time to check out. It sounds focused on the data warehouse from the job description. So you don’t have to worry about me competing with you. Feel free to comment on this post or DM me if you’re actively looking for something now.

Every month I merge a pile of pull requests, and every month most of them vanish into the ether without anybody noticing. Let’s fix that. This is the first of a series of monthly recaps of my public GitHub activity — numbers first, then the stories behind the interesting bits. Starting with September 2025 turned out to be a good call, because that month had a lot worth showing off. ...

Artificial Intelligence I had fun putting this together with Magica (previously known as Galaxy.AI). It is amazing to me how easy it was to get a result that I’m very satisfied with. Magica One of the reasons I went into so much detail about Magica (affiliate link) in my linked-in post about this is that they were offering a months worth of credits for writing a review. I didn’t have to pull any punches, so I was happy to share how’s it been working for me. ...

Subject: New Complete Example: DNSControl → CoreDNS Container with Automated Testing Howdy DNSControl Community, I’m excited to share a comprehensive example repository that demonstrates the complete workflow from DNSControl JavaScript configurations to a production-ready containerized DNS server: 🔗 Repository: https://github.com/fini-net/fini-coredns-example fini-net/fini-coredns-example Public Coredns with dnscontrol example Go 2 1 github.com What This Provides This repository showcases a real-world implementation of: ...

Well, well, well. Here we are in 2025 and Python packaging has finally been fixed. Not by the Python community, mind you - they had their shot for about 20 years. No, it took the Rust folks to come in and show us how it’s done. The Long, Painful History Let me paint you a picture. Back when I was starting out, we had distutils. That was it. Then came setuptools, which was supposed to fix everything. Then pip showed up to handle installation. Then virtualenv because global package installs were a nightmare. Then pipenv to combine pip and virtualenv. Then poetry because pipenv wasn’t quite right. Then pip-tools for deterministic builds. Then conda for scientific computing. Then… ...

Post on linked-in John Schreiber passed on July 29th, 2025. Remembrances will be held tomorrow, Saturday 23rd of August at Darcie Kent Estate Winery and Pete’s Brass Rail and Car Wash. Please also check out https://tinyurl.com/JohnSchreiber if you’d like see some pictures and video of John enjoying life. Comments Steve Schiro commented on linked-in: ...

It was fun to feed the Lorakeets at Busch Gardens Williamsburg this week. We kept missing them by a few minutes so we were so glad that we got to make it in finally. I tried the Merlin app in there, but it only detected the American Robin. I’m not sure if it ignored the exotic birds because they don’t belong in Virginia.

Introduction Like many, I’ve usually kept my charitable giving private — and I’ve respected that choice in others. But recently, a few people have asked where they might consider donating. Since I don’t see a need to keep it to myself, I’ll share my recommendations for anyone interested. I’ve organized this around a few themes. For each one I will link to the organization’s website and the Charity Navigator rating. For all of the organizations mentioned below, I respect them and I have personally donated to them at least once, but often over several years. I’m leaving out organizations that I don’t want to donate to for various reasons and local charities, but I may revisit those topics someday. I’m also not including much commentary on each one since I’m hoping you will find your own reasons to like them and contribute. ...