Shadow of the Cloud
© 2025 J. Ryan Johnson. All rights reserved.
Dispatches¶
Oh My Zsh on macOS: A Reference for a Clean, Maintainable Shell
If you spend a large part of your day in a terminal, your shell stops being just a shell and starts becoming part of your development environment. On my Mac, that environment is built around Zsh, Oh My Zsh, the Spaceship prompt, and a small set of plugins that improve the things I do constantly: Git, GitHub, containers, Kubernetes, Terraform, Python, Go, and Ansible. The result is not flashy for the sake of being flashy. It is a shell that surfaces useful context quickly, stays out of the way when I am focused, and is still simple enough to maintain without turning ~/.zshrc into a junk drawer.
Automate Locking Closed Issues and Pull Requests on GitHub
Locking a closed thread prevents new comments from being added. It keeps old threads quiet and lets maintainers direct their attention toward work that is still active. This post covers two approaches: a shell script using the GitHub CLI for one-time or ad hoc locking across one or more repositories, and a GitHub Actions workflow using dessant/lock-threads for ongoing automation.
Managing Stale Issues and Pull Requests with GitHub Actions
Every open-source project eventually faces the same problem: issues and pull requests that were once active go quiet. A bug report with no updates in a year. A pull request that was never finished. A feature request that the contributor lost interest in. These threads accumulate over time, and before long a repository's issue tracker becomes a graveyard of items that no one knows are still relevant.
The actions/stale GitHub Action gives maintainers a way to address this automatically. It scans issues and pull requests on a schedule, labels anything that has gone too long without activity, warns contributors that it will be closed soon, and closes it if no activity follows. The whole process is configurable and runs without manual intervention.
This post covers what the action does, how to configure it, a real-world example from one of my own projects, and an honest look at the tradeoffs so you can decide whether it makes sense for yours.
Ignoring Files in Git with .gitignore
Every Git repository accumulates files that should never be committed: compiled binaries, dependency directories, editor configuration, operating system metadata, and local environment files that contain secrets. Without a mechanism to exclude them, every git status output and git add . command becomes a manual filtering exercise. The .gitignore file is Git's built-in solution to that problem, and understanding how it works end to end, including its pattern syntax, scope model, and debugging tools, eliminates a class of frustration that affects developers at every experience level.