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Inside My VS Code Setup: Theme, Extensions, and Settings

VS Code

If you spend hours a day in your editor, your setup stops being a cosmetic preference and starts becoming part of how you think. Mine has evolved into a very opinionated VS Code environment tuned for the work I do most often: Go, Python, PowerShell, Ansible, Terraform, Markdown, YAML, JSON, and a steady stream of GitHub-driven automation.

Earlier this month, I wrote about why I use JetBrains GoLand and PyCharm over VS Code for some language-specific work. That's still true. But VS Code remains one of the most useful tools on my machine because it is fast, flexible, and easy to shape around the task in front of me.

This post is a tour of the setup I keep coming back to, the one that feels like home every time I open VS Code.

Hole in the Floor

Trigger Warning

This piece includes themes of violence, childhood trauma, and emotional neglect. Please proceed with care.

Reflection

Some houses hold warmth; the one I grew up in held its breath.

Tension lived in the walls, and even the floorboards carried the weight of something left unsaid.

This is a song about the kind of trauma that weaves itself into the grain of a life, and the impossible weight of an apology that arrives decades too late.

How to Write Effective GitHub Issue Templates

A pull request template improves the quality of proposed changes, but it only helps after someone has already made it to the solution stage. GitHub issue forms solve the earlier problem: they shape the information you collect when someone reports a bug, asks for an enhancement, or suggests a documentation fix. In that sense, they're the natural companion to a pull request template, and for many repositories they do even more to reduce maintainer back-and-forth.

While my previous post, How to Write an Effective GitHub Pull Request Template, was about improving review, this post is about improving intake.

  • Pull request templates help contributors explain a proposed change.
  • Issue template help contributors explain a problem, an idea, or a gap before any code has been written.

That distinction matters, because most maintainer time is lost much earlier in the process: missing reproduction steps, missing environment details, vague enhancement requests, and documentation issues with no concrete suggestion.

Some Things Stay Small

Trigger Warning

This piece includes themes of loss, grief, and hard mercy. Please proceed with care.

Lyrics

SOME THINGS STAY SMALL

I counted heads in the morning light
Steam rising thick in the January cold
The runt was pinned to the cedar slats
Too thin to stand, too weak to hold
Mama whispered, "Let him be"
But Daddy just stared at the ground
I learned right then, in the quiet air
A breaking heart doesn’t make a sound

     It don't pay to love what you can't save
     But you do it anyway
     You want to see 'em run the fields
     But the red clay wants 'em to stay
     And it’s a long, dark walk to the edge of the woods
     To give 'em the peace they crave
     Yeah, he wouldn't grow
     God, I know
     Some things stay small
     Then they go

Daddy weighed him with heavy eyes
Same way he’d done a hundred times
Said, "He ain’t gonna make the winter, son"
Like reading a sentence for a crime
The .22 rifle by the kitchen screen
Morning quiet, sharp and clean
There’s a kind of mercy that looks like a sin
When you’re the one standing in between

     Repeat Chorus

He was shivering where the others slept warm
Reaching for a teat in the middle of a storm
If mercy’s got a human face
It ain't in the prayer, it's in the hard embrace

I still see him when the night runs thin
When the radiator hums and the walls close in
I don’t dream of the blood or the broken things
Just a little life waiting on the peace it brings
I don’t curse my daddy’s hands
I don't hold a grudge for the debt he paid
It takes a whole lot of love to kill something
So it doesn't have to be afraid

It don't pay to love what you can't save
But you do it anyway
I still see him run the fields
In a dream from a different day
But he wouldn't grow
Now I know
Some things stay small
And that’s okay
Yeah, they go
Yeah, they go

Writer: J. Ryan Johnson (BMI)
Copyright: © 2026 J. Ryan Johnson. All rights reserved.
Phone: +1 (407) 902-5419
Email: hello [at] tenthirtyam [dot] org

Copyright

Lyrics: © 2025 J. Ryan Johnson. All rights reserved.

Audio Disclaimer

Lyrics: Original | Audio: AI-Generated

I am a songwriter and a musician, but I am not the voice meant to inhabit these verses.

I've used AI to bridge the gap for the concept demos, crafted to serve as blueprints that capture the genre, tone, and weary soul I hear for each song.

They exist as an invitation, offered in the hope that these lyrics will eventually reach the hands of an artist and storyteller who can bring them fully into the light.

Until then, they remain as they were born: quiet reflections on the grit and grace found just north of the county line.

Reflection

Published in tandem with What the Red Clay Keeps, which reflects on these tangled roots of affection and grief that defined my Southern experience.

What the Red Clay Keeps

Trigger Warning

This piece includes themes of loss, grief, and hard mercy. Please proceed with care.

There are places in the South where mercy rots before it ripens. You can feel it in the sag of a porch beam, in the black water holding still beneath the cypress knees, in the red clay that clings to a boot like a hand unwilling to let go. Even in winter the land keeps its fever. Spanish moss hangs from the trees like old church lace gone gray with grief. Cicadas are long dead by January, but their husks still cling to fence posts and bark, the empty shape of a thing that sang itself raw and left its shell behind.

This is the country of crumbling sheds and cedar slats silvered by weather, where small lives are counted at daybreak and losses are folded into chores before breakfast. The air smells of ping, wet straw, heat, stale prayer, and the sour sweetness of something too long confined. Somewhere a mother lowers her voice because the truth sounds uglier spoken aloud. Somewhere a father studies the ground as though judgment might be written in the red clay. Before anything happens, you already know everybody here has inherited something they did not choose and will not escape.