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content/journal/dispatch-3-may-2023/Results - Tar Heel 10 Miler.pdf → content/journal/dispatch-3-may-2023/10_miler_results.pdf
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@@ -6,10 +6,22 @@ tags:
- dispatch
- ebikes
references:
- title: "Some Favorite Reads From 2022 • by Kyle Aster"
url: https://warpspire.com/posts/some-favorite-reads-2022
date: 2023-04-30T18:47:22Z
file: warpspire-com-bhv7lv.txt
- title: "Simple Commit Linting for Issue Number in GitHub Actions | Viget"
url: https://www.viget.com/articles/simple-commit-linting-for-issue-number-in-github-actions/
date: 2023-04-30T18:47:23Z
file: www-viget-com-biybeb.txt
- title: "What Do You Want to Make Real in the World? — Anna Havron"
url: https://www.annahavron.com/blog/what-do-you-want-to-make-real-in-the-world
date: 2023-04-30T03:38:36Z
file: www-annahavron-com-34fw9w.txt
- title: "A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden"
url: https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
date: 2023-04-30T18:47:58Z
file: maggieappleton-com-n6xsqa.txt
---
Last month:
@@ -18,9 +30,11 @@ Last month:
* Closet project
* E-bike
* [Aventon Pace 500][1]
* Tar Heel 10 Miler
* Tar Heel 10 Miler ([results][2], [certificate][3])
[1]: https://www.aventon.com/products/pace500-3-step-through-ebike
[2]: 10_miler_results.pdf
[3]: 10_miler_certificate.png
<!--more-->
@@ -32,24 +46,24 @@ This month:
Reading:
* Fiction: [_Long Shadows_][2], David Baldacci
* Non-fiction: [_Building a Second Brain_][3], Tiago Forte
* _Looks like the author did a [podcast][4] I should check out_
* Fiction: [_Long Shadows_][4], David Baldacci
* Non-fiction: [_Building a Second Brain_][5], Tiago Forte
* _Looks like the author did a [podcast][6] I should check out_
[2]: https://bookshop.org/p/books/long-shadows-david-baldacci/18261851?ean=9781538719824
[3]: https://bookshop.org/p/books/building-a-second-brain-a-proven-method-to-organize-your-digital-life-and-unlock-your-creative-potential-tiago-forte/18265370?ean=9781982167387
[4]: https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/advice/podcast-816-building-a-second-brain/
[4]: https://bookshop.org/p/books/long-shadows-david-baldacci/18261851?ean=9781538719824
[5]: https://bookshop.org/p/books/building-a-second-brain-a-proven-method-to-organize-your-digital-life-and-unlock-your-creative-potential-tiago-forte/18265370?ean=9781982167387
[6]: https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/advice/podcast-816-building-a-second-brain/
Links:
* [_This Is How You Lose The Time War_][5]
* [recommended here][6]
* [Simple Commit Linting for Issue Number in GitHub Actions | Viget][7] -- short post on my company blog about two topics dear to me: continuous integration and information retrieval
* [What Do You Want to Make Real in the World?][8]
* [A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden][9]
* [_This Is How You Lose The Time War_][7]
* [recommended here][8]
* [Simple Commit Linting for Issue Number in GitHub Actions | Viget][9] -- short post on my company blog about two topics dear to me: continuous integration and information retrieval
* [What Do You Want to Make Real in the World?][10]
* [A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden][11]
[5]: https://bookshop.org/p/books/this-is-how-you-lose-the-time-war-amal-el-mohtar/18270911
[6]: https://warpspire.com/posts/some-favorite-reads-2022
[7]: https://www.viget.com/articles/simple-commit-linting-for-issue-number-in-github-actions/
[8]: https://www.annahavron.com/blog/what-do-you-want-to-make-real-in-the-world
[9]: https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
[7]: https://bookshop.org/p/books/this-is-how-you-lose-the-time-war-amal-el-mohtar/18270911
[8]: https://warpspire.com/posts/some-favorite-reads-2022
[9]: https://www.viget.com/articles/simple-commit-linting-for-issue-number-in-github-actions/
[10]: https://www.annahavron.com/blog/what-do-you-want-to-make-real-in-the-world
[11]: https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history

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#[1]Main RSS Feed
[2]Home
The Garden (BUTTON)
[3]Now
[4]About
(BUTTON)
Essays
evergreen
A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web
* [5]Digital Gardening
* [6]Personal Knowledge
* [7]The Web
Planted almost 3 years agoLast tended almost 2 years ago
(BUTTON) Back To Top
Table of Contents
[8]A Brief History of Digital Gardens[9]The Early Gardens of
Hypertext[10]Digital Puttering on Twitter[11]Gardens, Streams, and
Caufield's Metaphors[12]Carrying on Caufield[13]Digital Gardening's
Fertile Soil[14]Developer-led Gardening[15]The Six Patterns of
Gardening[16]1. Topography over Timelines[17]2. Continuous Growth[18]3.
Imperfection & Learning in Public[19]4. Playful, Personal, and
Experimental[20]5. Intercropping & Content Diversity[21]6. Independent
Ownership
Table of Contents
[22]A Brief History of Digital Gardens[23]The Early Gardens of
Hypertext[24]Digital Puttering on Twitter[25]Gardens, Streams, and
Caufield's Metaphors[26]Carrying on Caufield[27]Digital Gardening's
Fertile Soil[28]Developer-led Gardening[29]The Six Patterns of
Gardening[30]1. Topography over Timelines[31]2. Continuous Growth[32]3.
Imperfection & Learning in Public[33]4. Playful, Personal, and
Experimental[34]5. Intercropping & Content Diversity[35]6. Independent
Ownership
Loading...
My highlighted a number of sites that are taking a new approach to the
way we publish personal knowledge on the web.
They're not following the conventions of the "personal blog," as we've
come to know it. Rather than presenting a set of polished articles,
displayed in reverse chronological order, these sites act more like
free form, work-in-progress wikis.
A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren't strictly
organised by their publication date. They're inherently exploratory –
notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren't refined
or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will
grow and evolve over time. They're less rigid, less performative, and
less perfect than the personal websites we're used to seeing.
It harkens back to the early days of the web when people had fewer
notions of how websites "should be.” It's an ethos that is both
classically old and newly imagined.
__________________________________________________________________
[36]
A Brief History of Digital Gardens
Let's go on a short journey to the origin of this word. The notion of a
digital garden is not a 2020 invention. It's been floating around for
over two decades. However, it's passed through a couple of semantic
shifts in that time, meaning different things to different people
across the years. As words tend to do.
Tracing back how
[37]Neologisms
are born helps us understand why anyone needed this word in the first
place. Language is always a response to the evolving world around us –
we expand it when our current vocabulary fails to capture what we're
observing, or have a particular desire for how we'd like the future to
unfold. Naming is a political act as much as a poetic one.
The Early Gardens of Hypertext
Mark Bernstein's 1998 essay appears to be the first recorded mention of
the term. Mark was part of the early hypertext crowd – the developers
figuring out how to arrange and present this new medium.
While the essay is a beautiful ode to free-wheeling internet
exploration, it's less about building personal internet spaces, and
more of a manifesto on user experience flows and content organisation.
Let's note that Mark's graphics are to die for
To put this in its historical context, Mark's writing was part of a
larger conversation happening throughout the nineties around hypertext
and its metaphorical framing.
The early web-adopters were caught up in the idea of The Web as a
labyrinth-esque community landscape tended by and These creators wanted
to enable pick-your-own-path experiences, while also providing enough
signposts that people didn't feel lost in their new, strange medium.
The early web debates around this became known as – the issue of how to
give web users just enough guidance to freely explore the web, without
forcing them into pre-defined browsing experiences. The eternal
struggle to find the right balance of chaos and structure.
"Unplanned hypertext sprawl is wilderness: complex and interesting,
but uninviting. Interesting things await us in the thickets, but we
may be reluctant to plough through the brush, subject to thorns and
mosquitoes"
While Mark's essay was concerned with different problems to the ones we
face on the web today, its core ethos feels aligned with our emerging
understanding of digital gardening. It captures the desire for
exploratory experiences, a welcoming of digital weirdness, and a
healthy amount of resistance to top-down structures.
After Mark's essay the term digital gardening goes quiet for nearly a
decade.
Digital Puttering on Twitter
In April of 2007 when Tweets first started ringing through the internet
airwaves, Rory Sutherland (oddly, the vice president of Ogilvy Group)
used the term "digital gardening", but defined it as "faffing about
syncing things, defragging - like pruning for young people"
Loading...
The next dozen mentions on Twitter all followed this sentiment – people
were using the term as a way to describe digital maintenance - the act
of cleaning up one's digital space. The focus was on sorting, weeding,
pruning, and decluttering, rather than growing and cultivating. People
mentioned cleaning out private folders, codebases, and photo albums as
the focus of their gardening efforts.
These people were digital puttering more than gardening.
Loading...
Loading...
Loading...
Since none of these folks reference to the earlier nineties notion of
digital gardening, or mention issues of hypertext navigation, this use
of the word feels like a brief tangent. Given the tiny size of Twitter
in the early days, these people probably belonged to the same social
flocks and were riffing off one another. It's not necessarily part of
the mainstream narrative we're tracking, but shows there's not one
strict meaning to the term.
That said, some degree of faffing about, sorting, and pruning are
certainly part of the practice of digital gardening. Though best
enjoyed in moderation.
Gardens, Streams, and Caufield's Metaphors
At the 2015 Digital Learning Research Network, Mike Caufield delivered
a keynote on . It later becomes that lays the foundations for our
current understanding of the term. If anyone should be considered the
original source of digital gardening, it's Caufield. They are the first
to lay out this whole idea in poetic, coherent words.
Caufield makes clear digital gardening is not about specific tools –
it's not a Wordpress plugin, Gastby theme, or Jekyll template. It's a
different way of thinking about our online behaviour around information
- one that accumulates personal knowledge over time in an explorable
space.
Caufield's main argument was that we have become swept away by streams
– the collapse of information into single-track timelines of events.
The conversational feed design of email inboxes, group chats, and
InstaTwitBook is fleeting – they're only concerned with self-assertive
immediate thoughts that rush by us in a few moments.
This is not inherently bad. Streams have their time and place. Twitter
is a force-multiplier for exploratory thoughts and delightful
encounters once you fall in with the right crowd and learn to play the
game.
But streams only surface the Zeitgeisty ideas of the last 24 hours.
They are not designed to accumulate knowledge, connect disparate
information, or mature over time.
The garden is our counterbalance. Gardens present information in a
richly linked landscape that grows slowly over time. Everything is
arranged and connected in ways that allow you to explore. Think about
the way Wikipedia works when you're hopping from to to . It's
hyperlinking at it's best. You get to actively choose which curiosity
trail to follow, rather than defaulting to the algorithmically-filtered
ephemeral stream. The garden helps us move away from time-bound streams
and into contextual knowledge spaces.
"The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the
integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and
rearrangement of things to one another."
Carrying on Caufield
Good ideas take time to germinate, and Caufield's vision of the
personal garden didn't reach critical mass right off the bat. It lay
dormant, waiting for the right time and the right people to find it.
In late 2018 the corner of Twitter I hang out in began using the term
more regularly – folks began passing around Caufield's original article
and experimenting with ways to turn their chronological blogs into
exploratory, interlinked gardens.
Tom Critchlow's 2018 article was one of the main kick-off points. Tom
read Caufield's essay and began speculating on alternative metaphors to
frame the way we consume and produce information. They suggested we add
campfires to the idea of streams and gardens – the private Slack
groups, casual blog rings, and
[38]Cozy Web
areas where people write in response to one another. While gardens
present the ideas of an individual, campfires are conversational spaces
to exchange ideas that aren't yet fully formed.
Tom piece was shortly followed by Joel Hooks' in early 2019. Joel
focused on the process of digital gardening, emphasising the slow
growth of ideas through writing, rewriting, editing, and revising
thoughts in public. Instead of slapping Fully Formed Opinions up on the
web and never changing them.
Joel also added Amy Hoy's post to the pile of influential ideas that
led to our current gardening infatuation. While not specifically about
gardening, Amy's piece gives us a lot of good historical context. In
it, she explores the history of blogs over the last three decades, and
pinpoints exactly when we all became fixated on publishing our thoughts
in reverse chronological order (spoiler: around 2001 with the launch of
).
Amy argues that Moveable Type didn't just launch us into the
"Chronological Sort Era". It also killed the wild, diverse, hodge-podge
personalisation of websites that characterised the early web. Instead
of hand-coding your own layout and deciding exactly how to arrange the
digital furniture, we began to enter the age of standardised layouts.
Plug n' play templates that you drop content into became the norm. It
became harder and more technically involved to edit the HTML & CSS
yourself.
"Suddenly people weren’t creating homepages or even web pages...
they were writing web content in form fields and text areas inside a
web page."
Many people have lamented the web's slow transition from unique
homepages to a bland ocean of generic Wordpress themes. Digital
gardening is part of the pushback against the limited range of vanilla
web formats and layouts we now for granted.
Over the course 2019 and early 2020, more and more people began riffing
on the concept. Shaun Wang compiled the . Anne-Laure Le Cunff published
a popular guide to setting up . The IndieWeb community hosted a to
discuss the history of commonplace books, personal wikis, and memory
palaces.
By late 2020 this whole concept had attracted enough attention for the
MIT Tech Review to write on it. Perhaps this is the watershed moment
when a Twitter buzzword has "made it."
Digital Gardening's Fertile Soil
What made our current historical moment the right time for digital
gardening to take off?
The timing coincided with a few complimentary ideas and communities
rallying around personal knowledge systems, note-taking practices, and
reimagining tools for blogging. The scene was ripe for new ideas around
curating and sharing personal knowledge online.
Many of the people who jumped on the early digital gardening bandwagon
were part of communities like...
* The collective – a group that has been championing independent web
spaces outside the walled gardens of Instatwitbook for nearly a
decade.
* Users of the note-taking app – Roam pioneered new ways of
interlinking content and strongly appeals to people trying to build
sprawling knowledge graphs.
* Followers of Tiago Forte's course which popularised the idea of
actively curating personal knowledge.
* People rallying around the ethos that encourages continuously
creating 'learning exhaust' in the form of notes and summaries.
Developer-led Gardening
Many of these early adopters were people who understood how to build
websites – either professional developers or enthusiastic hobbyists.
Any kind of novel experimentation with the web requires knowing a
non-trivial amount of HTML, CSS, and JS. Not to mention all the
surrounding infrastructure required actually to get a site live.
Developers took to the idea because they already had the technical
ability to jump in play around with what garden-esque websites might
look like.
The current state of web development helped here too. While it feels
like we've been in a slow descent into a horrifyingly complex and
bloated web development process, a number of recent tools have made it
easier to get a fully customised website up and running. Services like
and have taken the pain out of deployment. Static site generators like
, , and make it easier to build sophisticated websites that
auto-generate pages, and take care of grunt work like optimising load
time, images, and SEO. These services are trying to find a happy middle
ground between tediously hand-coding solutions, and being trapped in
the restrictions of Wordpress or Squarespace.
While developers were the first on the scene, plenty of writers,
researchers, and note-taking enthusiasts have been drawn to the idea of
digital gardening. To help folks without programming skills join in,
there's been a surge in templates and platforms that allow people to
build their own digital gardens without touching a ton of code. I've
written an entire guide to
[39]Digital Gardening for Non-Technical Folks
if you fall into that category.
Tools like , , and are all great options. Many of them offer fancy
features like nested folders,
[40]Bi-Directional Links
, footnotes, and visual graphs.
However, many of these no-code tools still feel like cookie-cutter
solutions. Rather than allowing people to design the and spatial
layouts of their gardens, they inevitably force people into pre-made
arrangements. This doesn't meant they don't "count,” as "real” gardens,
but simply that they limit their gardeners to some extent. You can't
design different types of links, novel features, experimental layouts,
or custom architecture. They're pre-fab houses instead of raw building
materials.
__________________________________________________________________
[41]
The Six Patterns of Gardening
In all the recent gardening flurry, we've run into the inevitable
confusion around how to define the term.
Loading...
There are contested ideas about what qualifies as a garden, what the
core ethos should focus on, and whether it's worthy of a new label at
all. What exactly makes a website a digital garden as opposed to just
another blog?
After reading all the existing takes on the term, observing a wide
variety of gardens, and collecting some of the , I've identified a few
key qualities they all share.
There are a few guiding principles, design patterns and structures
people are rallying around. This amounts to a kind of digital gardening
[42]Pattern Language
.
1. Topography over Timelines
Gardens are organised around contextual relationships and associative
links; the concepts and themes within each note determine how it's
connected to others.
This runs counter to the time-based structure of traditional blogs:
posts presented in reverse chronological order based on publication
date.
Gardens don't consider publication dates the most important detail of a
piece of writing. Dates might be included on posts, but they aren't the
structural basis of how you navigate around the garden. Posts are
connected to other by posts through related themes, topics, and shared
context.
One of the best ways to do this is through
[43]Bi-Directional Links
– links that make both the destination page and the source page visible
to the reader. This makes it easy to move between related content.
Because garden notes are densely linked, a garden explorer can enter at
any location and follow any trail they link through the content, rather
than being dumped into a "most recent” feed.
Dense links are essential, but gardeners often layer on other ways of
exploring their knowledge base. They might have , , tags and filtering
functionality, , , or listing notable and popular content.
Many entry points but no prescribed pathways.
2. Continuous Growth
Gardens are never finished, they're constantly growing, evolving, and
changing. Just like a real soil, carrot, and cabbage garden.
The isn't how we usually think about writing on the web. Over the last
decade, we've moved away from casual live journal entries and
formalised our writing into articles and essays. These are carefully
crafted, edited, revised, and published with a timestamp. When it's
done, it's done. We act like tiny magazines, sending our writing off to
the printer.
This is odd considering editability is one of the main selling points
of the web. Gardens lean into this – there is no "final version” on a
garden. What you publish is always open to revision and expansion.
Gardens are designed to evolve alongside your thoughts. When you first
have an idea, it's fuzzy and unrefined. You might notice a pattern in
your corner of the world, but need to collect evidence, consider
counter-arguments, spot similar trends, and research who else has thunk
such thoughts before you. In short, you need to do your homework and
critically think about it over time.
In performance-blog-land you do that thinking and researching
privately, then shove it out at the final moment. A grand flourish that
hides the process.
In garden-land, that process of researching and refining happens on the
open internet. You post ideas while they're still "seedlings,” and tend
them regularly until they're fully grown, respectable opinions.
This has a number of benefits:
* You're freed from the pressure to get everything right immediately.
You can test ideas, get feedback, and revise your opinions like a
good internet citizen.
* It's low friction. Gardening your thoughts becomes a daily ritual
that only takes a small amount of effort. Over time, big things
grow.
* It gives readers an insight into your writing and thinking process.
They come to realise you are not a magical idea machine banging out
perfectly formed thoughts, but instead an equally mediocre human
doing The Work of trying to understand the world and make sense of
it alongside you.
This all comes with an important caveat; gardens make their
imperfection known to readers. Which brings us to the next pattern...
3. Imperfection & Learning in Public
Gardens are imperfect by design. They don't hide their rough edges or
claim to be a permanent source of truth.
Putting anything imperfect and half-written on an "official website”
may feel strange. We have all been trained to behave like tiny,
performative corporations when it comes to presenting ourselves in
digital space. Blogging evolved in the culture of Millenialism as a way
to Promote Your Personal Brand™ and market your SEO-optimized Content.
Weird, quirky personal blogs of the early 2000's turned into cleanly
crafted brands with publishing strategies and media campaigns. Everyone
now has a modern minimalist logo and an LLC.
Digital gardening is the response to the professional personal blog;
it's both intimate and public, weird and welcoming. It's less
performative than a blog, but more intentional and thoughtful than a
Twitter feed. It wants to build personal knowledge over time, rather
than engage in banter and quippy conversations.
Think of it as a spectrum. Things we dump into private WhatsApp group
chats, DMs, and cavalier Tweet threads are part of our chaos streams -
a continuous flow of high noise / low signal ideas. On the other end we
have highly performative and cultivated artefacts like published books
that you prune and tend for years.
Gardening sits in the middle. It's the perfect balance of chaos and
cultivation.
This ethos of imperfection opens up a world of possibility that
performative blogging shut down. First, it enables you to ; the
practice of sharing what you learn as you're learning it, not a decade
later once you're an "expert.”
This freedom of course comes with great responsibility. Publishing
imperfect and early ideas requires that we make the status of our notes
clear to readers. You should include some indicator of how "done” they
are, and how much effort you've invested in them.
This could be with a simple categorisation system. I personally use an
overly horticultural metaphor:
* 🌱 Seedlings for very rough and early ideas
* 🌿 Budding for work I've cleaned up and clarified
* 🌳 Evergreen for work that is reasonably complete (though I still
tend these over time).
I also include the dates I planted and last tended a post so people get
a sense of how long I've been growing it.
Other gardeners include an epistemic status on their posts – a short
statement that makes clear how they know what they know, and how much
time they've invested in researching it.
was one of the earliest and most consistent gardeners to offer
meta-reflections on their work. Each entry comes with:
* topic tags
* start and end date
* a stage tag: draft, in progress, or finished
* a certainty tag: impossible, unlikely, certain, etc.
* 1-10 importance tag
These are all explained in their , which is worth reading if you're
designing your own epistemological system.
Devon Zuegal is another notable gardener who has epistemic status and
epistemic effort on their posts, indicating both their certainty level
about the material, and how much effort went into making it. They also
make a strong case for as a feature, not a bug.
In a similar vein, Shawn Wang has written the Digital Gardening which I
adore and ascribe to. They ask the reader to allow the writer to be
wrong, offer constructive criticism, and attribute their work. They ask
gardeners to be considerate of others (don't share private information
or name and shame), offer epistemic disclosure, and respond to
feedback.
The digital gardening terms of service – Source: Shawn Wang, swyx.io
All of these design patterns feed our growing desire for transparency,
meta information, and breadcrumbs back to the source of ideas.
4. Playful, Personal, and Experimental
Gardens are non-homogenous by nature. You can plant the same seeds as
your neighbour, but you'll always end up with a different arrangement
of plants.
Digital gardens should be just as unique and particular as their
vegetative counterparts. The point of a garden is that it's a personal
playspace. You organise the garden around the ideas and mediums that
match your way of thinking, rather than off someone else's standardised
template.
Ideally, this involves experimenting with the native languages of the
web – HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. They're the most flexible and robust
tools we have for building interconnected knowledge online. Gardens are
a chance to question the established norms of a 'personal website', and
make space for weirder, wilder experiments.
That said, I should acknowledge that jumping into full-on web
development is simply beyond the abilities and interests of many
people. There is still room for personalisation and play if you're
using a pre-made template or service – it'll just be within the
constraints of that system.
One goal of these hyper-personalised gardens is deep contextualisation.
The overwhelming lesson of the Web 2.0 social media age is that dumping
millions of people together into decontextualised social spaces is a
shit show. Devoid of any established social norms and abstracted from
our specific cultural identities, we end up in awkward, aggravating
exchanges with people who are socially incoherent to us. We know
nothing of their lives, backgrounds, or belief systems, and have to
assume the worst. Twitter only offers us a 240 character bio. Facebook
pre-selects the categories it deems important about you – relationship
status, gender, hometown.
Gardens offer us the ability to present ourselves in forms that aren't
cookie cutter profiles. They're the higher-fidelity version, complete
with quirks, contradictions, and complexity.
5. Intercropping & Content Diversity
Gardens are not just a collection of interlinked words. While linear
writing is an incredible medium that has served us well for a little
over 5000 years, it is daft to pretend working in a single medium is a
sufficient way to explore complex ideas.
It is also absurd to ignore the fact we're living in an audio-visual
cornucopia that the web makes possible. Podcasts, videos, diagrams,
illustrations, interactive web animations, academic papers, tweets,
rough sketches, and code snippets should all live and grow in the
garden.
[intercropping-garden_shrink_mx6nx8.png]
Historically, monocropping has been the quickest route to starvation,
pests, and famine. Don't be a lumper potato farmer while everyone else
is sustainably intercropping.
6. Independent Ownership
Gardening is about claiming a small patch of the web for yourself, one
you fully own and control.
This patch should not live on the servers of Facebook, LinkedIn,
Twitter, Instagram (aka. also Facebook), or Medium. None of these
platforms are designed to help you slowly build and weave personal
knowledge. Most of them actively fight against it.
If any of those services go under, your writing and creations sink with
it (crazier things have happened in the span of humanity). None of them
have an easy export button. And they certainly won't hand you your data
in a transferable format.
A set of walled gardens with the Twitter, Medium, and Facebook logos
next to an open garden built on HTML, CSS, and Markdown
Independently owning your garden helps you plan for long-term change.
You should think about how you want your space to grow over the next
few decades, not just the next few months.
If you give it a bit of forethought, you can build your garden in a way
that makes it easy to transfer and adapt. Platforms and technologies
will inevitably change. Using old-school, reliable, and widely used web
native formats like HTML/CSS is a safe bet. Backing up your notes as
flat markdown files won't hurt either.
Keeping your garden on the open web also sets you up to take part in
the future of gardening. At the moment our gardens are rather solo
affairs. We haven't figure out how to make them multi-player. But
there's an enthusiastic community of developers and designers trying to
fix that. It's hard to say what kind of libraries, frameworks, and
design patterns might emerge out of that effort, but it certainly isn't
going to happen behind a Medium paywall.
A set of gardens with plant life moving between them
__________________________________________________________________
This is all my take on gardening, but knowledge and neologisms always
live within communities. No one owns The Official Definition of digital
gardening. Numerous people have contributed to the growing conversation
and you should read their thoughts as well.
Want to share? (BUTTON) Tell Twitter About It
8 Backlinks
The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI
Proving you're a human on a web flooded with generative AI content
A Short History of Bi-Directional Links
Seventy years ago we dreamed up links that would allow us to create
two-way, contextual conversations. Why don't we use them on the web?
Digital Gardening for Non-Technical Folks
How to build a digital garden without touching code
Transclusion and Transcopyright Dreams
The lost permissioning and copyright system of the Web
The Pattern Language of Project Xanadu
Project Xanadu as a pattern language, rather than a failed software
project
Growing the Evergreens
Illustrated notes on the concept of 'Evergreen notes' and how to write
them
A Meta-Tour of This Site
A video tour through how I build the old version of this site
Tending Evergreen Notes in Roam Research
A walkthrough of how I manage and tend Evergreen notes in Roam
Mentions around the web
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with-heart
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Hacker News
Abra Tusz
King | "OG" Zettelkasten 🧠 2nd Brain 🚢
HN Front Page
⎯ΘωΘ⟶
lqdev
Evgeny Kuznetsov
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Brad
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talyssa
Chris Krycho
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[44]wildrye.commentionedMarch 10, 2023
Image by Pallangor, How to Make a Beautiful Minecraft GardenGarden of
Infinite Possibilities Jorge Luis Borges’ story the “Garden of Forking
Paths” is set in an elaborate garden, but the real garden is a book
that is structured in such a way as to allow infinite possibilities.
[45]wildrye.commentionedMarch 09, 2023
Mike Caufield talks about his collection of notes in his wiki and how
they work together as a rich network of ideas. Part of his method is to
very carefully describe the relationship between two ideas when he
builds his links. These descriptions become ideas in their own right.
[46]Cristinamentionedin What the heck is a digital garden?March 04,
2023
Digital gardens are a relatively new concept that are gaining
popularity online. They are often described as a cross between a blog
and a personal wiki. At its core, a digital garden is a place for
someone to share their thoughts, ideas, and learning experiences in a
more casual
Whatdefang
[47]WhatdefangmentionedFebruary 28, 2023
Naming is a political act as much as a poetic one.
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© 2023 Maggie Appleton
* [48]The Garden
* [49]Essays
* [50]About
* [51]Notes
* [52]Now
* [53]Patterns
* [54]Library
* [55]Projects
* [56]Colophon
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6. https://maggieappleton.com/topics/personal-knowledge
7. https://maggieappleton.com/topics/the-web
8. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#a-brief-history-of-digital-gardens
9. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#the-early-gardens-of-hypertext
10. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#digital-puttering-on-twitter
11. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#gardens-streams-and-caufield's-metaphors
12. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#carrying-on-caufield
13. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#digital-gardening's-fertile-soil
14. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#developer-led-gardening
15. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#the-six-patterns-of-gardening
16. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#1-topography-over-timelines
17. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#2-continuous-growth
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19. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#4-playful-personal-and-experimental
20. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#5-intercropping-&-content-diversity
21. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#6-independent-ownership
22. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#a-brief-history-of-digital-gardens
23. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#the-early-gardens-of-hypertext
24. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#digital-puttering-on-twitter
25. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#gardens-streams-and-caufield's-metaphors
26. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#carrying-on-caufield
27. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#digital-gardening's-fertile-soil
28. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#developer-led-gardening
29. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#the-six-patterns-of-gardening
30. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#1-topography-over-timelines
31. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#2-continuous-growth
32. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#3-imperfection-&-learning-in-public
33. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#4-playful-personal-and-experimental
34. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#5-intercropping-&-content-diversity
35. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#6-independent-ownership
36. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#a-brief-history-of-digital-gardens
37. https://maggieappleton.com/neologisms
38. https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web
39. https://maggieappleton.com/nontechnical-gardening
40. https://maggieappleton.com/bidirectionals
41. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#the-six-patterns-of-gardening
42. https://maggieappleton.com/pattern-languages
43. https://maggieappleton.com/bidirectionals
44. https://wildrye.com/what-is-a-digital-garden/
45. https://wildrye.com/the-digital-garden-as-an-experience-generator/
46. https://embersonthehearth.com/2023/03/04/what-the-heck-is-a-digital-garden/
47. https://twitter.com/whatdefang/status/1630464510740815872
48. https://maggieappleton.com/garden
49. https://maggieappleton.com/essays
50. https://maggieappleton.com/about
51. https://maggieappleton.com/notes
52. https://maggieappleton.com/now
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#[1]alternate
* [2]Now
* [3]Giving
* [4]Offsets
* [5]About Me
Some Favorite Reads From 2022
January 15, 2023
Another year, and another [6]blog post (singular). Oh well. I always
have aspirations to publish more! But you know, one of the joys of
being semi-retired is not having to do anything. You know, it’s been a
hard few years. So I tried to take it easy on myself in 2022. I spent a
lot of time exploring, a lot of time reflecting, and a good bit of time
just doing whatever felt right at the time.
For example, going on a road trip with my mountain bike
Recently I’ve been reflecting on some of my favorite things from last
year. Maybe as a way to focus on the positive. Maybe as a way to keep
track of time in our time sick world. Maybe just to get back into the
habit of writing. So here’s some of my favorite reads of 2022.
__________________________________________________________________
Books
I really enjoy reading, but this year I kind of gave myself a pass on
anything too serious — mostly sticking to my trusty home base
of science fiction.
* [7][this-is-how-you-lose-the-time-war.jpg]
This is How You Lose The Time War
* [8][rendevous-with-rama.jpg]
Rendevous with Rama
* [9][elder-race.jpg]
Elder Race
* [10][artifact-space.jpg]
Artifact Space
Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s [11]This is How You Lose the Time War
From the publisher:
Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandment finds
a letter. It reads: Burn before reading.
Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents
hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring
factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, becomes
something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that
could change the past and the future.
I fucking loved this book. I started it based on a recommendation from
a friend, and didn’t really look into it much before I started. This
book is much less about the plot (which is a play off The End of
Eternity) and more about the writing and world building. The best way I
could describe it is a spy story told through love letters in a poetic
universe.
Think of birds as a comms channel I can open and close seasonally;
fellow operatives relate their work to me at the equinoxes; Garden
blooms more brightly in my belly. There’s enough traffic that it’s a
simple matter to disguise incoming and outgoing correspondence,
misdirect, hide in plain sight.
It’s also a short read, which was a nice breath of fresh air after
finishing off the Dune series prior to picking this one up. I have a
feeling this is going to be one of my most recommended books going
forward.
Arthur C. Clarke’s [12]Rendevous with Rama
From the publisher:
An enormous cylindrical object has entered Earth’s solar system on a
collision course with the sun. A team of astronauts are sent to
explore the mysterious craft, which the denizens of the solar system
name Rama. What they find is astonishing evidence of a civilization
far more advanced than ours. They find an interior stretching over
fifty kilometers; a forbidding cylindrical sea; mysterious and
inaccessible buildings; and strange machine-animal hybrids, or
“biots,” that inhabit the ship. But what they don’t find is an alien
presence. So who–and where–are the Ramans?
I’d never read the Rama books before, so when I heard that Denis
Villeneuve was going to be [13]tackling Rendevous with Rama, I took the
opportunity to read the whole series (Rendevous with Rama, Rama II, The
Garden of Rama, and Rama Revealed).
Rendevous with Rama is a fantastically Clarke book. A team of highly
trained professionals all work together to explore a mysterious object
in space. Does much more need to be said? This book went down like a
peanut butter and jelly sandwich. My only criticism is that it left me
wanting for was more.
Rama is a cosmic egg, being warmed by the fires of the Sun. It may
hatch at any moment.
And unfortunately, there is more.
Clarke teamed up with Gentry Lee to write three more novels — Rama II,
The Garden of Rama, and Rama Revealed and I all I can say is: I do not
recommend them. They are upsetting in very odd child-bride wedding
night kinds of ways.
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s [14]Elder Race
From the publisher:
A junior anthropologist on a distant planet must help the locals he
has sworn to study to save a planet from an unbeatable foe.
I loved Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time, so when I heard Jason Snell
offer up Elder Race on The Incomperable, I decided to give it a go. I
absolutely love the premise of this book. It’s a singular story told
from two different viewpoints, one of them science fiction, and the
other fantasy — both happening in parallel — because the two main
characters don’t share enough dialect to explain themselves to each
other.
They think I’m a wizard. They think I’m a fucking wizard. That’s
what I am to them, some weird goblin man from another time with
magic powers. And I literally do not have the language to tell them
otherwise. I say, “scientist,” “scholar,” but when I speak to them,
in their language, these are both cognates for “wizard.” I imagine
myself standing there speaking to Lyn and saying, “I’m not a wizard;
I’m a wizard, or at best a wizard.” It’s not funny.
And who doesn’t love an old, cranky wizard anthropologist?
Miles Cameron’s [15]Artifact Space
From the publisher:
Out in the darkness of space, something is targeting the Greatships.
With their vast cargo holds and a crew that could fill a city, the
Greatships are the lifeblood of human occupied space, transporting
an unimaginable volume - and value - of goods from City, the
greatest human orbital, all the way to Tradepoint at the other, to
trade for xenoglas with an unknowable alien species.
This was another recommendation from a friend, and I’m glad I picked it
up. At it’s core, it’s about highly competent people all working
together, pushing their limits, and achieving success. It’s the kind of
genre someone once described to me as competency porn — Star Trek: The
Next Generation being the ultimate example.
There was very little drama in Space Operations. In fact, every
station projected an elaborate aura of calm, as if they were
competing to be dry and emotionless. No one swore, no one spat, no
one was angry or afraid. Nbaro loved it.
This book pulls from a lot of familiar ideas — the Greatships are an
obvious call back to Battlestars, while a lot of the socialist themes
call back to Star Trek’s economy. My biggest criticism of this book is
the maddening way Cameron switches back and forth between using
character’s first and last names — even within the same scene! It makes
it incredibly difficult to keep track of who is who with such a large
cast, and toward the end I caught myself not even remembering who a
certain person was.
Dennis E. Taylor’s [16]Heaven’s River (Audiobook)
From the publisher:
More than a hundred years ago, Bender set out for the stars and was
never heard from again. There has been no trace of him despite
numerous searches by his clone-mates. Now Bob is determined to
organize an expedition to learn Bender’s fate—whatever the cost.
The Bobiverse is probably my favorite audiobook series of all time.
It’s all a part of a grand space opera spanning the galaxy… but also
pretty sarcastic and silly? Ray Porter does an amazing job of narrating
these books, and is a large part of why I enjoy them so much.
Heaven’s River finds a way to pull the series back from the infinite
and focuses back down on a single planet for a great little beaver
adventure.
Well, space beavers.
__________________________________________________________________
Even More Books
Neal Stephenson’s [17]Termination Shock: Okay, I actually like
Stephenson, and this is a very good book about the inevitable future of
Geoengineering and it’s political consequences. Coupled with a very
weird Queen fetish. It’s weird. Weird enough to take away from the
story line. But if the climate angle of the book interests you — I
highly recommend [18]After Geoengineering as a follow-up.
Baoshu’s [19]The Redemption of Time: A semi-official 4th book of the
Three Body Problem. This is a great continuation of the series, and a
good way to answer some lingering questions about the Trisolarians.
Frank Herbert’s [20]Heretics of Dune (Dune 5): I was a little shocked
at how much I loved this book. I mean, I love Dune. But this one ended
up being one of my favorites of the series. Great new characters, new
technologies, and a whole new set of powers for the Atreides genetics.
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s [21]Children of Time: This was actually a re-read
in preparation of reading Children of Ruin and the upcoming Children of
Memory. What can I say? It’s one of my favorite science fiction books
of all time — even if only for the worldbuilding. Sentient spiders?
Sentient spiders!
__________________________________________________________________
Newsletters
Alex Steffen’s [22]The Snap Forward
From [23]Discontinuity is the Job:
To be alive right now is to find ourselves flattened against the
fact that the entire human world—our cities and infrastructure, our
economy and education system, our farms and factories, our laws and
politics—was built for a different planet.
I can’t remember exactly how I stumbled on Alex Steffen’s The Snap
Forward but the idea instantly clicked with me. His newsletter focuses
on how climate has affected our infrastructure, our society, and our
relationship to the world. I love his newsletter because it makes me
feel more sane in a world that keeps trying to sell a new carbon offset
marketplace as the solution.
From [24]Tempo, Timing, and the Translucence of the Future
The tempo of change, and our refusal to acknowledge its
acceleration, has turned our visions of continuity, stability and
value into fantasy worlds. We’re cosplaying people who live in past
decades before discontinuity ate our societies.
I wouldn’t classify The Snap Forward as doomerism, either. It’s a focus
on accepting the world as it is and looking for solutions within that
framework. Even if all emissions were cut to zero tomorrow, we’d still
be facing a myriad of very challenging futures. What do we do with that
knowledge? How do we prepare for the transapocalyptic now?
Matt Levine’s [25]Money Stuff
I’ve been reading Money Stuff for a few years now, and I can’t really
put my thumb on why I love it so much. Sure, it’s about finance… but
kind of the weird stuff in finance. More about the cogs of the
machinery and the weird personalities in the news than it is about
whether the S&P 500 is going to go up or down next week.
From [26]FTX’s Balance Sheet Was Bad:
But then there is the “Hidden, poorly internally labeled ‘fiat@’
account,” with a balance of negative $8 billion. I don’t actually
think that you’re supposed to subtract that number from net equity —
though I do not know how this balance sheet is supposed to work! —
but it doesn’t matter. If you try to calculate the equity of a
balance sheet with an entry for HIDDEN POORLY INTERNALLY LABELED
ACCOUNT, Microsoft Clippy will appear before you in the flesh,
bloodshot and staggering, with a knife in his little paper-clip
hand, saying “just what do you think you’re doing Dave?” You cannot
apply ordinary arithmetic to numbers in a cell labeled “HIDDEN
POORLY INTERNALLY LABELED ACCOUNT.” The result of adding or
subtracting those numbers with ordinary numbers is not a number; it
is prison.
It’s an understatement to say I don’t love finance, but I do enjoy me
some Money Stuff.
__________________________________________________________________
What’s Next?
I’ve really been enjoying re-visiting some of my favorite authors and
finishing off big series I never quite got around to. Last year I
finally finished off the whole of Frank Herbert’s Dune (never having
read 5 & 6 before), and this year I’m getting the itch to do the same
for Foundation. To be frank, I don’t even remember where I ended with
that series. But it does feel like a good opportunity to maybe just
re-visit the entirety of the Asimov Universe… [27]in chronological
order. I’m also getting a terrible itch to revisit a bunch of
Vonnegut’s work after watching the excellent [28]Unstuck in Time. But I
like new authors too!
I’m also interested in finding more books and newsletters about… I
guess you’d call it urban design. Stuff like [29]Strong Towns and other
sources of how to adapt our cities into resilient communities. I
actually have background in city planning from my Civil Engineering
days, but I feel like there’s been a big surge in new thinking that
goes farther than the YIMBY/NIMBY noise of the past decade.
Have some recommendations? Hit me up on Mastadon:
[30]@kneath@indieweb.social.
Est. 2003 • Do Hard Things • Build. Learn. Explore.
References
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6. https://warpspire.com/posts/money-pit
7. https://bookshop.org/p/books/this-is-how-you-lose-the-time-war-amal-el-mohtar/18270911?aid=13508&ean=9781534430990&gclid=CjwKCAiAy_CcBhBeEiwAcoMRHMYspqPk88ZoP8--CUUbXYfJi5-1npSPEUSq-QroPTijJK-cIC1CAxoCIGsQAvD_BwE&listref=this-is-how-you-lose-the-time-war
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12. https://bookshop.org/p/books/rendezvous-with-rama-arthur-c-clarke/8296887?ean=9780358380221
13. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/denis-villeneuve-rendezvous-with-rama-movie-1235062337/
14. https://bookshop.org/p/books/elder-race-adrian-tchaikovsky/15877279
15. https://bookshop.org/p/books/artifact-space-miles-cameron/18367466?ean=9781473232617
16. https://www.amazon.com/Heavens-River-Bobiverse-Book-4/dp/B088C51F5H/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
17. https://bookshop.org/p/books/termination-shock-neal-stephenson/18272978?ean=9780063028067
18. https://bookshop.org/books/after-geoengineering-climate-tragedy-repair-and-restoration/9781788730365
19. https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-redemption-of-time-a-three-body-problem-novel-baoshu/6986329?ean=9781250306005
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21. https://bookshop.org/p/books/children-of-time-adrian-tchaikovsky/113411?ean=9780316452502
22. https://alexsteffen.substack.com/
23. https://alexsteffen.substack.com/p/discontinuity-is-the-job
24. https://alexsteffen.substack.com/p/tempo-timing-and-the-translucence
25. https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters/money-stuff
26. https://newsletters.feedbinusercontent.com/818/8185a1196937308adee75e80f544a29a36b34a5f.html
27. https://gist.github.com/kneath/27a2772f5e1871e3c314ef05a4cacd44
28. https://www.vonnegutmovie.com/
29. https://www.strongtowns.org/
30. https://indieweb.social/@kneath
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Read the Article: AI in Recruiting
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AI in Recruiting
Git logo variation
Article
Simple Commit Linting for Issue Number in GitHub Actions
Simple Commit Linting for Issue Number in GitHub Actions
Git logo variation
[22]David Eisinger
[23]David Eisinger, Development Director
Article Category: [24]#Code
Posted on April 28, 2023
* Share
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Including relevant ticket numbers in your git commit messages is a gift
to your future self. Here's how to ensure you do it consistently.
I don't believe there is a right way to do software; I think teams can
be effective (or ineffective!) in a lot of different ways using all
sorts of methodologies and technologies. But one hill upon which I will
die is this: referencing tickets in commit messages pays enormous
dividends over the long haul and you should always do it. As someone
who regularly commits code to apps created in the Obama era, nothing
warms my heart like running [25]:Git blame on some confusing code and
seeing a reference to a GitHub Issue where I can get the necessary
context. And, conversely, nothing sparks nerd rage like fix bug or PR
feedback or, heaven forbid, oops.
In a recent [26]project retrospective, the team identified that we
weren't being as consistent with this as we'd like, and decided to take
action. I figured some sort of commit linting would be a good candidate
for [27]continuous integration — when a team member pushes a branch up
to GitHub, check the commits and make sure they include a reference to
a ticket.
I looked into [28]commitlint, but I found it a lot more opinionated
than I am — I really just want to make sure commits begin with either
[#XXX] (an issue number) or [n/a] — and rather difficult to
reconfigure. After struggling with it for a few hours, I decided to
just DIY it with a simple inline script. If you just want something you
can drop into a GitHub Actions YAML file to lint your commits, here it
is (but stick around and I'll break it down and then show how to do it
in a few other languages):
steps:
- name: Checkout code
uses: actions/checkout@v3
with:
fetch-depth: 0
- name: Set up ruby 3.2.1
uses: ruby/setup-ruby@v1
with:
ruby-version: 3.2.1
- name: Lint commits
run: |
git log --format=format:%s HEAD ^origin/main | ruby -e '
$stdin.each_line do |msg|
next if /^\[(#\d+|n\/a)\]/.match?(msg)
warn %(Commits must begin with [#XXX] or [n/a] (#{msg.strip}))
exit 1
end
'
A few notes:
* That fetch-depth: 0 is essential in order to be able to compare the
branch being built with main (or whatever you call your primary
development branch) — by default, your Action only knows about the
current branch.
* git log --format=format:%s HEAD ^origin/main is going to give you
the first line of every commit that's in the source branch but not
in main; those are the commits we want to lint.
* With that list of commits, we loop through each message and compare
it with the regular expression /^\[(#\d+|n\/a)\]/, i.e. does this
message begin with either [#XXX] (where X are digits) or [n/a]?
* If any message does not match, print an error out to standard error
(that's warn) and exit with a non-zero status (so that the GitHub
Action fails).
If you want to try this out locally (or perhaps modify the script to
validate messages in a different way), here's a docker run command you
can use:
echo '[#123] Message 1
[n/a] Message 2
[#122] Message 3' | docker run --rm -i ruby:3.2.1 ruby -e '
$stdin.each_line do |msg|
next if /^\[(#\d+|n\/a)\]/.match?(msg)
warn %(Commits must begin with [#XXX] or [n/a] (#{msg.strip}))
exit 1
end
'
Note that running this command should output nothing since these are
all valid commit messages; modify one of the messages if you want to
see the failure state.
Other Languages [29]#
Since there's a very real possibility you might not otherwise install
Ruby in your GitHub Actions, and because I weirdly enjoy writing the
same code in a bunch of different languages, here are scripts for
several of Viget's other favorites:
JavaScript [30]#
git log --format=format:%s HEAD ^origin/main | node -e "
let msgs = require('fs').readFileSync(0).toString().trim().split('\n');
for (let msg of msgs) {
if (msg.match(/^\[(#\d+|n\/a)\]/)) { continue; }
process.stderr.write('Commits must begin with [#XXX] or [n/a] (' + msg + ')'
);
process.exit(1);
}
"
To test:
echo '[#123] Message 1
[n/a] Message 2
[#122] Message 3' | docker run --rm -i node:18.15.0 node -e "
let msgs = require('fs').readFileSync(0).toString().trim().split('\n');
for (let msg of msgs) {
if (msg.match(/^\[(#\d+|n\/a)\]/)) { continue; }
process.stderr.write('Commits must begin with [#XXX] or [n/a] (' + msg + ')'
);
process.exit(1);
}
"
PHP [31]#
git log --format=format:%s HEAD ^origin/main | php -r '
while ($msg = fgets(STDIN)) {
if (preg_match("/^\[(#\d+|n\/a)\]/", $msg)) { continue; }
fwrite(STDERR, "Commits must begin with #[XXX] or [n/a] (" . trim($msg) . ")
\n");
exit(1);
}
'
To test:
echo '[#123] Message 1
[n/a] Message 2
[#122] Message 3' | docker run --rm -i php:8.2.4 php -r '
while ($msg = fgets(STDIN)) {
if (preg_match("/^\[(#\d+|n\/a)\]/", $msg)) { continue; }
fwrite(STDERR, "Commits must begin with #[XXX] or [n/a] (" . trim($msg) . ")
\n");
exit(1);
}
'
Python [32]#
git log --format=format:%s HEAD ^origin/main | python -c '
import sys
import re
for msg in sys.stdin:
if re.match(r"^\[(#\d+|n\/a)\]", msg):
continue
print("Commits must begin with #[xxx] or [n/a] (%s)" % msg.strip(), file=sys
.stderr)
sys.exit(1)
'
To test:
echo '[#123] Message 1
[n/a] Message 2
[#122] Message 3' | docker run --rm -i python:3.11.3 python -c '
import sys
import re
for msg in sys.stdin:
if re.match(r"^\[(#\d+|n\/a)\]", msg):
continue
print("Commits must begin with #[xxx] or [n/a] (%s)" % msg.strip(), file=sys
.stderr)
sys.exit(1)
'
__________________________________________________________________
So there you have it: simple GitHub Actions commit linting in most of
Viget's favorite languages (try as I might, I could not figure out how
to do this in [33]Elixir, at least not in a concise way). As I said up
front, writing good tickets and then referencing them in commit
messages so that they can easily be surfaced with git blame pays huge
dividends over the life of a codebase. If you're not already in the
habit of doing this, well, the best time to start was Initial commit,
but the second best time is today.
[34]David Eisinger
[35]David is Viget's managing development director. From our Durham,
NC, office, he builds high-quality, forward-thinking software for PUMA,
the World Wildlife Fund, NFLPA, and many others.
[36]More articles by David
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