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As I've blogged about before, I've written a tool for improving the experience of working with Renovate's debug logs, providing a more targeted experience for viewing the logs. While there are a few options out there at the moment, including part of our products at Mend, it's also nice having an agnostic tool I can use across different products, or where a customer or a user has provided logs to us. Last week, I finally sat down to listing out some of the key improvements I'd like to have…
For over a decade, I've been a proponent of writing detailed Git commit messages. I find it a valuable use of my time, and continue to double down on it, even in a world where you can get a Large Language Model (LLM) to write it for you. In the past, I've written about at least 89 strong feelings I have about Git commits, so I'm naturally biased to the benefit of commit messages, but why does this still hold in the current age, where a lot of people are delegating that to an AI agent, if at…
The main thing this week has been GopherCon UK - an expensive week, and unfortunately not as good as previous years - but you can see my writeup for more info On Tuesday night when I got in, I went over to Monohon Ramen which was nice A bit of delays on the way home didn't help after a busy few days 🥱 Recorded a Fallthrough episode with Kris and Matt when I got back on Friday, but feel that I shouldn't have tried to get it in after being at the conference - I was pretty exhausted and feel I was…
For the 3rd year running, I've been at GopherCon UK and am surprised to have survived the heat in London - highs of 36 degrees yesterday - but thankfully The Brewery is a lovely and cool event space. I'm writing this on the train home, with a slightly tired voice, and a little tired after a good time - thanks again to the organisers for putting it on! How to Stay Passionate in the Age of AI Ainsley Clark kicked us off by talking about ways that we can stay passionate with the reshaping of our…
🤖 This post includes some LLM-derived content 🤖 In the Renovate project, we use the Merge Queue to merge PRs. If a PR fails its status checks, it will be pulled out of the Merge Queue, and a maintainer will need to re-queue it, if it is a transient error. For those of you unaware, GitHub are having a pretty hard time recently with outages, which means that we're seeing an increase in the number of PRs being pulled out of the Merge Queue due to transient errors due to GitHub's instability (and…
Ditto to last week: still not finished my Canada blog post Was a bit of a busier week with Anna in the office for a good chunk of the week And a pretty intense week at work on top of that 😬 Continuing to try and refine the plan Claude needs to implement for my Micropub rewrite Had a nice weekend down in London for my mum's birthday The a very bad drive down - took an extra ~90 minutes, including traffic as we were trying to get onto the M1 and by Hemel, with standstill traffic, and Waze…
Ditto to last week: still not finished my Canada blog post Work's been particular busy this week with various bits going on, and an accidental major release And as it'd been a pretty intense week, Friday was a little bit more a "catch your breath" day where I worked on a couple of bits, got Claude Fable to investigate some things for me (and it got some pretty good investigations, similar to what I would have done!) Had a nice massage on Friday, and a lil' mooch about town This week I've been…
🤖 This post includes some LLM-derived content 🤖 I've been recently thinking about how Open Source maintenance seems to be becoming a little more a slog recently - largely with the increased amount of contributions possible with AI agents - and how it impacts being a maintainer. I'm very fortunate that my literal job is to be an Open Source project maintainer (among other things) and that it's a privilege not many others have. That being said, it still doesn't mean that undoes the amount of work…
When contributors raise PRs to Renovate, there are times where they'll merge main into their PR while they're waiting for a merge. Because we use a Merge Queue, we don't necessarily need this - as maintainers we'll manually merge main into a PR if we think it needs it, but it's mostly a case of waiting for the Merge Queue to handle it. Although we have a label that we add if we notice the author of a PR is merging main in - unnecessarily - we'll add a label which adds an automated nudge to say…
A busy week at work Got accepted to the Claude for Open Source program I've been looking, again, at rewriting my Micropub endpoint - it's been a long time on my list but I've never sat down with the time to do so - I'd like to get it into a nice place, but the time is always the difficulty. With that in mind, today I've been seeing if Claude can dig through my codebase, get some bits together to work out what features I've got and what'd need to be there, and then end up doing the rewrite, so…
🤖 This post includes some LLM-derived content 🤖 I've recently been using the pattern I described to combine Renovate and Vendir to sync files in a number of repos, as a means to track OpenAPI spec dependencies. However, one thing I've found a bit painful is that when using Vendir to track these dependencies, the directory structure gets very nested. For instance, with config such as: # via https://github.com/rootlyhq/rootly-go/blob/61c86b8660b6f25d1e8d8638417de173350dfb61/vendir.yml apiVersion:…
A busy week back at work, catching up on what I'd missed, doing some decision making + Product-y thinking A fair bit of stuff to catch up did make it a slightly stressful start to the week, though Had a fun time at the GitHub Secure Open Source Fund's "Red Team - Repository Under Attack" event GitHub Secure Open Source Fund: Red Team - Repository Under Attack: A Hands-On Incident Response Exercise Helpful to get some more practice on how to handle your repository/organisation being compromised…
A busy week before our trip to Canada 🎉 (Full Canada holiday writeup to come) It was very toasty this week As a way to reduce the overall heat, I ended up leaving my PC off while working, and found that worked quite well - but does mean I need to listen to music through my phone, which isn't ideal Sainsburys had the shutters down over their fridges But people didn't put them back after perusing - so spent a bit of time going round and putting them back while looking around but it also tripled…
(Full Canada holiday writeup to come) Reading: Tiamat's Wrath Leviathan Falls Watched: The Drama (2026) Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022) Switzerland vs Algeria (World Cup 2026) Canada vs Morocco (World Cup 2026)
(Full Canada holiday writeup to come) Got ~1 hour sleep on the plane, and ~1 hour in the cab home, so didn't get going to pick up Cookie right away from Anna's parents - but after some caffeine I was ready to drive us to pick up Cookie Then Cookie decided to be rather alert during the night, so didn't catch up on sleep particularly well, and then last night Morph was the annoying pet 😅 So hoping to get some more sleep tonight, cause it's kinda getting to us! It's been much warmer coming home…
Enjoyed the last of the Selkirk Bannock A busy week catching up, dealing with a bit of fallout while I was OOO, picking up a few high-priority bits and doing some product-y evaluation of our backlog Some more good work on rootly-go this week oapi-codegen's now - on main - got initial OpenAPI 3.1 support, which we'll release in a few weeks One night, Morph was wailing at something - it turns out another cat was in one of our flower beds, and didn't want to leave, but don't worry, Cookie helped 🤭…
🤖 This post includes some LLM-derived content 🤖 Let's say that you're trying to determine what percentage of your work is using AI - for instance as part of a performance review - how would you go about doing that? I've written before about how I personally attribute code and content from a Large Language Model. I still very much appreciate myself following the practice, and find it useful - even if others don't want to follow a similar process - as it helps "keep myself honest" with noting…
A lovely week in Scotland at No. 2 Braefoot Cottage, which I very much recommend! Was lovely to get more chilled time with my parents, catching up and having some chill time I didn't bing my laptop charger with me by mistake, and fortunately nothing went wrong that needed it! Had some good walks and got some pretty awesome views - and mostly good weather, very impressively considering it was Scotland 😹 My new walking boots were good, and glad to have broken them in a little more now Cookie got…
A busy week ahead of a holiday away in Scotland Thinking about pausing my Changelog++ subscription, as right now there's not really much happening Changelog wise, which is a shame A nice dinner at Everyday People with Carol, Alan and Nisha - a bit loud (with it being busier due to Restaurant Week) but good food 😋 A pretty good drive up to Scotland and some pretty great views and beautiful nature - expect to see some photos in the coming week! I'll potentially add a few things to these over the…
A nice relaxed Bank Holiday Monday We spent the day mostly trying to hide from the heat - highs of ~32 made it rather toasty Glad I did the decking on Saturday/Sunday, as it was so toasty And playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 almost all the day - continuously until the game crashed in the evening 🫣 A pretty busy work week One very good thing is that we're back to being able to publish npm packages 🚀 Had a good chat with Brian about our integrations with Maven Central Enjoyed doing my first…
My friend Alan wrote yesterday in a thread on Bluesky: In my end-of-year review I was described as a 'craft engineer' more than once. I don't disagree with this, but I have to wonder if this approach (one that has been comfortable for me for more than 10 years) is totally incompatible with modern AI tooling and a 'deliver it' mindset in a team? I want to split this across what I do; use the new tools and deliver quickly in my workplace, and not use AI at all for my personal work and use that…
It's heating up this week, and tomorrow is going to be ~33! Spent some time digging into how Renovate's caches work, to write up some more in-depth docs, and learned a number of interesting things I'm looking forward to finish writing up KvK vs 521 was fun We smashed them in prep, but they lasted longer than us for the battle Was interesting joining the Discord during the battle, and hearing the coordination conversations And funny when I joined 521's Discord call (just to see how things were…
Got my job title changed at work, covering the role I do have and the work I'm doing (but no update to /salary/) which is cool! It's also a lot easier to say: -Senior Developer and Open Source Project Maintainer +Renovate Project Lead Another busy week with a lot of stuff going on, but some good bits done Preparing for a webinar I'm doing next-next week Still waiting for GitHub/npm support to help us unpublish a number of old npm releases so we can publish new package versions for Renovate Had…
This week I joined Kris Brandow on the Fallthrough podcast, talking about a mix of things. It was another fun episode, and I'm looking forward to listening back to it to hear about some fo the things we talked about. Hope y'all enjoy it!
Over the last few years, I've spent time working on projects like dependency-management-data with the intent that I could provide visibility into organisational usage of dependencies and insight into how outdated they are, which continues with working upstream on Renovate and Mend's enterprise offerings. Over the last few years of work, I've spent time looking at some of the great metrics the CHAOSS project work on, where I found the Libyear metric: Libyears gives a more tangible definition of…
In the last month I've found I've been hyper aware of noticing folks writing open-source everywhere I look, which feels like there's something slightly larger at play. Where I've had access and means to, I'll correct references to correctly call it either open source or Open Source as appropriate, but there's a lot out there I don't really have the time to try and correct for everyone, so here's a blog post to hopefully make more of an impact. For those that aren't aware, there are two distinct…
A very short workweek, with Bank Holiday Monday, the GitHub Maintainers Summit and Matt's funeral on Thursday Had a chilled Bank Holiday Monday Was nice to be invited to the GitHub Maintainers Summit, and found it a good time! I didn't end up writing many notes that are worth sharing publicly, in particular because there were a number of confidential sessions where lot of the interesting things were being shared! Sorry y'all! Some good discussions, and it was at times hard to follow the…
Earlier today I was working with a Yarn codebase for the first time on one of my machines, and I hit an awkward error I'd not seen before: % yarn install yarn install v1.22.22 error Error: Failed to replace env in config: ${NPM_TOKEN} at /usr/lib/node_modules/yarn/lib/util/env-replace.js:19:13 at String.replace (<anonymous>) at envReplace (/usr/lib/node_modules/yarn/lib/util/env-replace.js:14:16) at NpmRegistry.normalizeConfig (/usr/lib/node_modules/yarn/lib/registries/npm-registry.js:423:69)…
A fairly busy week at work, and a mix of getting stuff done across the Open Source world In Renovate: Finished off the ability to make it so Renovate only provides updates to Go modules within your go directive, which we've wanted for oapi-codegen - already been very useful! With it being the start of Maintainer Month, I've been thinking about what we can do to support maintainers who use Renovate, as well as increase insight into the Renovate project itself We hit the "too many published…
