turing complete with a stack of 0xdeadbeef

Writing by tag: github

GitHub Tip: using the involves filter

30 October 2023

When you work on a large team and are participating in many pull requests on GitHub, it can be difficult to keep track of everything you are working on. In addition to opening your own pull requests, you can be assigned to them, you can be requested as a reviewer, you can comment in discussion threads, and you can be mentioned by others. Each of these occurrences requires your attention — perhaps immediately, but always eventually.

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Automatically assign milestones with GitHub Actions

04 August 2022

One of the most important parts of software development is tracking changes. Documenting what is going into a release is necessary not only to simply know what changed and inform your users by writing good release notes, but also to track down issues when something goes wrong. If there’s a new bug or a new crash in your latest release, you need to be able to quickly find the change that introduced the problem.

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Using DocC on GitHub Pages

Pros and Cons 22 April 2022
Updated: 25 April 2022

When I first wrote about DocC, I lamented the fact that it was incompatible with static hosting on GitHub Pages. Much has changed since my last post, so let’s take a fresh look. While there have been many welcome improvements to the tool, there are a few remaining issues that prevent me from adopting it for my open source projects.

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Automate merging release branches into your main branch with GitHub Actions

26 March 2022

A typical release process for Git workflows involves creating a release branch, performing various tests on that branch, and applying any necessary fixes or changes to that branch. Once stable and ready to release, you create a build from the release branch, create a git tag, and finally merge the release branch changes back into your main branch.

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How to start a blog or portfolio website, for developers

01 November 2021
Updated: 05 November 2021

Ever so often an iOS developer asks me how to get started with making their own blog or portfolio website. Or, I’ll see a software developer from another community on Twitter ask the same thing. Often they are earlier in their career, or unfamiliar with web development, or unsure whether to build from scratch or use a platform, or all of the above. I find myself consistently making the same recommendations to folks. For this post, I want to share what I think is a great approach to get started, and how you can dive deeper once you master the basics.

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Useful label-based GitHub Actions workflows

24 August 2021
Updated: 21 March 2022

My current team has started using GitHub Actions to automate some tedious tasks for pull requests. In particular, we use labels on GitHub to categorize pull requests or highlight important metadata about them. Most of the time, a machine can figure out which labels are appropriate to add or remove. This is a great use case for GitHub Actions.

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Setting up default community health files on GitHub and crafting a thorough Contributing Guide for any open-source project

24 January 2020

Every open-source author, maintainer, and contributor knows the importance of fostering a positive environment for collaboration and providing adequate resources for folks to seek help and contribute in a meaningful way. These resources include providing a Code of Conduct, a Contributing Guide, issue templates, and more. GitHub refers to this collection of documents as community health files, and they have been slowly improving their support for them. I recently spent some time creating defaults for these files, including crafting a completely new Contributing Guide for all of my projects.

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Selecting an Xcode version on GitHub Actions CI

06 January 2020

I have started using GitHub Actions for CI on a new project as a replacement for my usual setup on Travis CI. It generally seems to be much faster and more reliable so far. It also has an equivalent feature set, as far as I can tell. But one issue that I have run into is selecting a specific Xcode version, which is a bit cumbersome and not fully documented.

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Officially deprecating JSQMessagesViewController

No longer maintaining or supporting this project 16 July 2017
Updated: 18 July 2017

Beginning immediately, JSQMessagesViewController is no longer officially supported or maintained. In fact, you may have noticed that it has been neglected for the past year. The most recent release was published almost exactly one year ago today. This is an incredibly difficult post for me to write and I have not made this decision carelessly. This open source project had a great run. There was (and still is) a great community around it, and I’m sorry for bringing this to an end.

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