Proposal: a controlled vocabulary for attitudes towards pull-requests, forks and bug-reports

Yesterday I read Just Say No, a post by Jeff Geerling who maintains a bunch of popular devops project on GitHub. His position, which I am totally sympathetic to, is that maintaining a project is a lot of hard and mostly uncompensated work, and so:

That pull request that’s 100 lines and’ll take you an hour to review? No.

That issue that’s requesting you to pull your project just in a slightly different direction? No.

That little opportunity that you’ve been waiting for but you just know you can’t do right now? No.

Again, I am sympathetic. I agree, mostly. Yet at the same time, I hate to imagine being the guy who spent multiple days on a PR to something of real value, only to have it insta-rejected with “Sorry, I don’t have time to review this”.

Government consultation on Imperial measurements

Our essay-crisis dead-cat government is now planning to appease disaffected Brexit voters by giving them Imperial measurements, in place of the metric that we have been moving towards since the 1960s and which the majority is living UK citizens were brought up with. There is a consultation on this, but it’s been very poorly publicised. I encourage you to make a submission. Here is mine.

Why football is important

A while back, I signed a government petition, “Review the need for a statutory owners and Directors Test in Football”. As a result, I got an email today:

The Petitions Committee would like to hear your views on why football clubs are important, and who you think should be responsible for ensuring they survive the Covid-19 pandemic.

Share your views by completing this anonymous survey: https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/CYLH7W/.

So I filled in the survey. (It doesn’t take long, and if it’s something you have an opinion on, you should feel free to do the same.)

In response to the main question, Why are football clubs important?, this is what I wrote:

Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the statues?!

Keep Calm but Don’t Carry On

I’m fond of the old WWII slogan Keep Calm and Carry On. It’s not just that it captures something appealingly British (yes, there are still appealing aspects to the stereotypically British character), it’s that in most circumstances it’s such excellent advice.

These are not most circumstances.

What Skyrim taught me about wealth

A few years ago, I got into playing Skyrim on our XBox 360. There are many wonderful things about Skyrim, including its immersive sense of place, its vast and varying geography, its brooding landscapes and complementary atmospheric music, its epic scope, its interesting NPCs, its endless range of ways to power up, and so on.

Early in the game, when cash was scarce, I got into a routine that each dungeon I entered, I would carefully loot every vase and chest, and strip every monster I killed of its weapons, armour and valuables; then when I was done I’d return to civilisation and sell off the spare armour, weapons, etc.

Major releases are disasters, and should be avoided whenever possible

If you use semantic versioning in your project — and you should — then you fix bugs in patch releases (e.g. going from v2.4.6 to v2.4.7), and add new features in minor releases (e.g. from v2.4.6 to v2.5.0). These are both unambiguously good things to do: downstream projects that use your project can happily and blindly upgrade to your new versions knowing that everything is compatible and nothing will break.

But when you issue a new major release (e.g. from v2.4.6 to v 3.0.0), that’s because you made an incompatible change. Now the maintainers of downsteam packages have to stop and think and read your release notes before they can be confident whether it’s safe to upgrade, or whether (as with all the various React-related libraries’ major versions) they’re going to have to rewrite their code first. Most often, they won’t have the time or energy to do this for all the many dependencies their project has.

Church governance and cultural mismatch

About ten or twelve years ago, we used to go to a Baptist church (which, note well, indicates a very different denomination in the UK from what it is in the US). Unlike other churches we’d been members of, it had a rigidly democratic governance structure — something that had both pros and cons. Once a year, there would be a business meeting where members of the congregation would all come and hear proposals from the church leader and vote on them.

Here’s what post-truth politics looks like

I came across an extraordinary short (18 seconds) video, which I will transcribe:

Krishnan Guru-Murthy: The Conservative MP Ben Bradley is in the House of Commons. He voted to Remain, then became a Brexiteer, then voted against the deal, then voted for the Deal, then said he’d struggle to back the deal again, but now says he will back the deal. Ben Bradley, why do you get to change your mind?

Ben Bradley: I haven’t changed my mind.

A Thursday in December

Starring Gandalf the Grey.

It’s probably best thought of as a sound collage, and one that I find strangely relaxing.