Dispatches¶

Backseat Dream

With a Quiet Hand

I hope death comes like a quiet hand lifting me from the backseat, half-asleep, carrying me to my bed, where, tucked beneath familiar blankets and with eyes closed, the gentle voices of those I love pass through a cracked door, holding me a moment longer in their warmth as I slip into rest.

That is still the gentlest image I know for leaving this world. Not terror. Not noise. Not some grand and blinding revelation. Just the old mercy of being too tired to walk on your own and trusting that someone strong and familiar will carry you the rest of the way.

My memories of safety began in the backseat of a car at night. The tires humming. A light waiting at the end of the drive. Low voices drifting from the front seat while I hovered at the edge of sleep. Sometimes waking just enough to know we were home, then feeling someone lifting me before I ever had to stand and drifting deeper into sleep.

One arm under my knees, one hand at my back, my head against a shoulder.

No understanding the house in the dark. Only trusting the arms carrying me through it.

I hope it comes that way. I hope I am tucked beneath something familiar. I hope the voices of those I love reach me through a cracked door for one moment longer. I hope the end feels less like being taken than being brought home.

If I am granted that kind of mercy, it will be enough.

A Kind of Tiredness That Gets Into Everything

The moment that finally made me admit it wasn't dramatic at all. Early morning in the home office, I was just sitting in my chair and I said it out loud.

"I'm exhausted. I'm burning out."

Nothing was actively wrong in that particular second. No alarm going off. No argument. No fresh bad news. Just the usual screen glow, a chair I've spent too many hours in, a few tabs open, and that strange hush that sometimes falls in the middle of an ordinary day when your mind stops long enough to catch up with your body.

And what I realized, sitting there, wasn't a feeling so much as a weight. The weight of every small unfinished thing. Every obligation with my name on it. Every text I hadn't answered yet, every errand still waiting, every decision still asking to be made, every part of life that needed some steady portion of me I wasn't sure I had available.

It was one of those moments where the boundaries disappear. Work was in it, yes, but so was the house, the calendar, the relationships, the noise, the constant low-grade management of being a person alive in the world. I remember sitting there and thinking, very plainly, this is heavier than I've been willing to say out loud.

How to Use GitHub Projects Effectively

Most engineering teams still plan work in one tool and ship it in another. Issues live in Jira or Trello, pull requests live in GitHub, and every status change requires a human to copy context across tabs. GitHub Projects removes much of that friction by keeping planning, issue tracking, and delivery close to the code.

Current GitHub Projects is the planning layer on top of issues and pull requests: custom fields, saved views, built-in automations, roadmaps, charts, and API access. It replaces Projects (classic), not the same product with a new coat of paint.

For teams that already live in GitHub, the value is straightforward:

• Less context switching between a tracker and the code host
• Fewer stale status updates because issue and pull request state can drive project state
• One place to plan cross-repository work without losing repository-level detail
• A workflow that works for a two-person open source project, an inner source program, or a larger engineering org

Keeping GitHub Repository Mirrors in Sync with GitHub Actions

Mirroring a Git repository sounds simple until you need it to stay current without thinking about it. A one-time copy is easy. The useful version is a mirror that keeps following upstream branches, tags, and rewritten history without becoming another chore on your list.

I use this pattern for repositories I want to preserve, test against, or keep available under my own GitHub namespace. A recent r/github threasd asked about mirroring a public repository into a private one; this is the workflow I use for that and similar cases.

The twist is that I don't put the sync workflow in each destination repository. I keep the automation in a standalone private repository that acts as a mirror controller.

Before getting to GitHub Actions, it helps to understand the manual Git operation the workflow is automating.

Why Mirror a Repository?

A mirror is useful when you want a repository to follow another repository as closely as possible. That is different from a normal fork, where you expect to create your own branches, open pull requests, and maintain local work.

I usually think about mirrors as infrastructure, not collaboration space. They are useful for:

• Keeping a personal copy of an upstream project
• Preserving access to a dependency you rely on
• Testing automation against a repository under your own namespace
• Keeping several upstream repositories available from one GitHub account or organization
• Avoiding a manual Sync fork habit for repositories that should simply track upstream

That last point is the practical one. If the destination is supposed to reflect upstream, humans should not be the scheduler.

Papa was a Pepper

Beautiful, Structured Logs for Go CLIs with charmbracelet/log

If most of the logs from your Go CLI still look like a wall of monochrome timestamps and free-form strings, you're leaving a lot of developer experience on the table. Charm's log package gives you colorful, readable, structured terminal output without forcing you into a heavyweight API or a machine-first JSON mindset from the start.

There's nothing wrong with simple logging. The problem is that simple logging tends to stay simple long after your application stops being simple.

At first, a few log.Println calls feel harmless. Then the output gets noisy. Errors look almost the same as info messages. Request context gets squeezed into ad hoc strings. The one line you need is somewhere in the middle of a hundred identical timestamps, and your terminal gives you very little help separating signal from noise.

That's the gap charmbracelet/log tries to fill. It's a leveled, structured, human-readable logger built for terminals. It looks good out of the box, keeps the API small, and still gives you the structured fields and formatting controls you want for real projects.

The Fine Art of a Minimal Reproducible Example

Two hours in, what you're actually shipping is a GitHub issue, a JIRA ticket, or a Slack thread: symptoms, hunches, pasted logs, then one more file because someone asked nicely. Each round trip tugs another detail out of your repo while the runnable version still lives mostly on your machine. Then a follow-up makes you spell out the repro steps you sort of skipped the first time, and halfway through your reply the bug stops looking fuzzy. Nobody merged a fix for you. You just finally described it clearly enough to see it yourself.

That loop is about as expensive as debugging gets, and almost none of it is mandatory. The antidote is the minimal reproducible example (MRE): the smallest, most self-contained piece of code that reliably triggers the problem you're trying to explain. Being kind to whoever reads your ticket is a nice side effect. The main payoff is that your own picture of the break gets sharper. Most of the time you'll see the answer yourself before you hit send.

Bulk Delete GitHub Deployments

Repositories that ship often, especially to GitHub Pages or similar environments, can rack up a long list of deployments. The UI is fine for spot checks, but it doesn't give you a fast way to clear old rows when you only care about what is current. The REST API deletes one deployment per request, so the practical approach is the same as workflow run cleanup: loop with the GitHub CLI (gh).

This post starts with a loop that deletes deployments whose latest status is inactive, then adds a variant that also removes error and failure without touching rows that still end in success.

T.J.