2023 Year Review
What a year, I spent most of my time on a sail boat, cruising around the Caribbean etc, and working part-time for Wikimedia on Wikibase. WBStack became Wikibase.Cloud and the team now working behind it has continued to iterate on the platform, which finally made its way out of its early alpha state. That also…
Developer previews with AWS, Terraform and GitHub Actions
As a developer, one of the most critical aspects of your workflow is the ability to test and preview your code changes before deploying them to production. This is where developer previews come in. This post will outline how to create your own simple developer preview system, using Github Actions for building, AWS S3 for…
2022 Year Review
I’ve been doing year reviews since 2017 under the #year-review tag, and 2022 is no different. Expect I have been living aboard a sailboat traveling the world for the latter half of the year. So this year is probably going to look a little different in retrospect, including far less time coding and writing about…
Small commits
There are many blog posts and articles out there about making small git commits. I’m sure most people (including me) bring up the same few topics around why small commits are good and why we should all probably be making smaller commits. In this post, I’ll look at some of the key topics from my…
Delete all Github releases, using the Github cli
If you are like me, at some point while developing projects on Github you will have started and stopped using releases, opting to switch back to only creating tags. Github defaults leave you in a bit of an awkward position here where the “Releases” section in the side bar will continue to show your old…
A first look at Wikidata through Github Copilot
I was added to the Github Copilot preview in the past days, and the first thing I tested out was code suggestions around Wikidata. Copilot allows you to start writing code, and have a model trained on public Github code suggest block of code that you might want to use. For example, if you start…
Github repo settings sync, using the Github cli
The number of Github repositories that I end up maintaining in one way or another ends up growing week by week. And keeping all of the descriptions and settings up to date in sync can be painful todo by hand. A little while ago I migrated my addwiki project to use a monorepo, and thus…
Programmatically convert Github master branch to main
Back in 2020 Github said that the default settings for new repositories would change. On Oct. 1, 2020, any new repositories you create will use main as the default branch, instead of master Some blog post on Medium Github provided some advice for renaming branches focused around how this can be done in the UI.…
2020 Year Review
Another year is up, and what a year it has been. I finally open sourced wbstack, I complained about fake news, looked at Minecraft mods and took a look at how COVID-19 was affecting Wikipedia page views. I make this post mainly for me to be able to look back at each year in a…
Open Sourcing WBStack
Open Sourcing the code and config for WBStack has always been part of the plan, although functionality came first throughout the first year or so. Finally there is a github organization for wbstack containing 16 public repositories that make up the entire deployment for wbstack.com. This effort took a few weeks trying to split sensible…