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Dispatches

Out on Highway 84

Reflection

This song isn’t a true history, but it is rooted in a true place and the kind of hunger that only bites when you’re young, reckless, and willing to work.

My brother and I spent our summers hauling watermelons and cantaloupes off our Grandaddy’s farm, stacking them into a trailer hitched to an old Massey that had seen better decades. We’d sit for hours on the shoulder of the road under a hand-painted sign, watching the heat shimmer off the asphalt and dreaming the day away once the heavy lifting was done.

There was a jagged kind of freedom in those afternoons. It was the independence of cash in a pocket and the quiet pride of having something the world actually wanted during in the middle of a long, hot day.

This song takes that truth and stretches it until it’s a little more dangerous, landing somewhere in the haze between a memory and a myth. It’s a nod to a specific kind of freedom that you have to earn with your hands and a tribute to South Georgia in July, where the humidity makes the world feel like it’s liquefying around you and you’re just trying to white-knuckle the things that keep you moving.

Lyrics

OUT ON HIGHWAY 84

Asphalt’s bleeding tar, summer of ‘94
Crossed the dry county line on highway 84
Air’s thick as molasses, smell of diesel and pine
I’m perched on this tailgate, just killing off time

Got a hand-painted sign saying "Sweetest in the State"
Two bucks a sugar-baby, 'fore it’s too late
Cicadas are screaming like a choir in the heat
While that South Georgia sun bakes the soles of my feet

     It’s the Fourth of July and the blacktop’s steaming
     Heat off the hood has the whole highway dreaming
     Got a bed full of melons, green gold and deep red
     And a jar of lightning to keep my soul fed
     Let the law keep rolling, let the flags fly high
     Trading in sugar ‘neath the South Georgia sky

A man in a Caddy rolled through the grit
Kicking up the gravel like it owes him rent
I spat a black seed, looked him dead in the eye
Said, "The dirt gave me fruit; the Lord gave me sky"
He bought a thirty-pounder and left in a swirl
Of red clay and gravel at the edge of the world

     Repeat Chorus

Radio static or a preacher with the news
Talking ‘bout the Lord, get your asses in the pews
Deputy rolling, eyeballing the scene
Tip my tattered hat, Lord my record ain’t clean

     Repeat Chorus

Yeah, the summer of ‘94
Out on Highway 84

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

Songwriter Note

I am a songwriter and a musician, but I'm not confident that I have the voice that's needed to inhabit these verses.

My hope is that these words eventually find an artist and storyteller to help me breathe life into them. If that collaboration never comes, I may record them myself rather than let them settle into silence.

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

Ghostty: The Terminal Emulator That Refuses to Compromise

Ghostty logo

Most terminal emulators ask you to make peace with an awkward tradeoff. You can have something fast but austere, polished but slow, powerful but painfully non-native. Ghostty, created by Mitchell Hashimoto, is interesting because it doesn't merely try to improve one side of that triangle. It tries to make the tradeoff smaller. The result is a terminal that is GPU-accelerated, deeply configurable, standards-aware, and designed to feel like a first-class citizen on the platform it runs on.

At the highest level, Ghostty is a modern terminal emulator for macOS and Linux. That sounds ordinary right up until you look at how it positions itself. The project is explicitly built around three goals:

  • Fast
  • Feature-rich
  • Native

The third goal is where the project gets interesting.

There are plenty of fast terminals. There are plenty of featureful terminals. There are also terminals that feel at home on a specific operating system. Very few try to be genuinely strong in all three categories at once, because that is much harder than slapping a fast renderer on a cross-platform UI toolkit and calling it a day.

Ghostty takes the harder path. On macOS, it uses real Apple frameworks. On Linux, it integrates with GTK4 and the surrounding desktop environment. Underneath those platform-specific shells is a shared Zig core that handles terminal emulation, rendering, and the heavy lifting that makes Ghostty feel so absurdly responsive.

If you spend a good chunk of your day in a shell, an editor, a multiplexer, or a remote session, that combination matters more than it may seem on paper.

GitHub Milestones as Release Payloads

Issues and pull requests accumulate quickly on any active project. Without structure, a repository becomes a flat list of work with no clear sense of what belongs together, what's blocking a release, or how close you're to shipping. Milestones give that structure: lightweight containers that define the payload of a release, track progress automatically, and surface what remains without requiring a separate project board or external tool.

This post covers how milestones work, how to name and manage them, how to operate them through the UI, the GitHub CLI, and the REST API, and how to automate the tedious parts with GitHub Actions. It's opinionated: these are the practices that work in production open source repositories, not a neutral survey of every option.

A milestone is a named container attached to a repository. It holds issues and pull requests, carries an optional description and due date, and displays a live progress bar computed from the ratio of closed to total items. Nothing more. That simplicity is the point.

How to Inspect Code in PyCharm and GoLand

Most developers first encounter JetBrains code inspections as red underlines and yellow warnings inside the editor. That live feedback is the same inspection engine behind Problems, batch runs, and shared profiles, even when the UI says "problem" in places. It's useful, but it isn't the real power move. Instead, learn how to run a deliberate inspection pass across a file, package, module, or whole project before you commit your changes and open a pull request.

That workflow lives in Problems, Project Errors, Code | Inspect Code, scope selection, and inspection profiles. Once you start using this, PyCharm and GoLand stop being fancy editors and become a code quality gate.

Applies Across JetBrains IDEs

My focus here is on PyCharm and GoLand because they're the tools I use most. The same inspection model also shows up across other JetBrains IDEs, though the exact inspection groups, plugins, and file-type support will vary by product and project setup.

By the time a problem reaches CI/CD, you've already paid the context-switch tax:

  • You wrote the code.
  • You staged it.
  • You pushed it.
  • You waited for the pipeline.
  • You reopened the work.

By contrast, when PyCharm or GoLand finds the issue locally, you can usually fix it while the code is still fresh in your head.

That's the value of leaning on inspections end to end. The IDE isn't only marking mistakes in the current file as you type. It can also run structured inspection passes against broader scopes of code and show you the results in one place, grouped, triaged, and ready to fix.

For a lot of Python and Go developers, that second part is the missing piece.

It also does something more subtle over time: It teaches you patterns.

If you keep paying attention to the same warnings, quick fixes, and inspection results, you start to internalize better habits before the IDE has to remind you.

Upload govulncheck Results to GitHub Code Scanning for Go

If you already use GitHub security features for Go, it is tempting to assume CodeQL and Dependabot cover everything you need. They do not fully replace govulncheck.

For Go projects, govulncheck adds a very useful layer: it understands the Go vulnerability database and uses package and call graph information to reduce noise. That means it can help answer a more practical question than "is this module version mentioned in an advisory?" It can help answer "does this vulnerability affect code my project actually uses?"

That is enough of a difference that I think govulncheck is worth surfacing directly in GitHub code scanning, not just running as an isolated terminal command or a one-off CI step.

Namiko

In Remembrance

Namiko Akoi Miller
April 01, 1932–September 01, 1993

Reflection

Few things are as still as a South Georgia library in the dead of summer. The air inside is thick with the scent of old paper and the hum of a laboring compressor, while the dust drifts through shafts of light.

Namiko Akoi Miller was the steward of that stillness. As the librarian of Seminole County Public Library, she was a quiet mercy in a landscape that didn’t always know how to hold a gentle thing. To a child fleeing the white-hot sun or a restless home, she offered up worlds bound in glue and buckram. She would press her stamp to the page; a small ritual of safe passage.

The quiet didn't just end; it tore. I was a junior in high school when the town’s fragile veneer of safety was once again peeled back, exposing the old shadows underneath. We learned then what we’ve known ever since: you don't ever truly outrun the way violence hollows out a small place.

This song isn't about her murder. It's about the grace of a woman in a house of stories, and the way that grace continues to haunt the pine curtains and the red clay, long after the sanctuary was breached.

Lyrics

NAMIKO

A freight train’s echo, water tower in the air
Dust on the hardbacks, sunlight on the stairs
She knew every title and she knew every face
Keeping the peace in a small-town place

     Faded ink on the due dates, a pocket full of prayers
     A quiet kind of calling, an empty wooden chair

     And it ain’t the books that haunt that room at night
     It’s the lamp still burning in the borrowed light
     Where the stories always ended the way you hoped they would
     A chapter closed in Seminole like no one thought it could

Kids came in laughing, sun-drenched, summer-sweet
A note in the margins, a squeak in the seat
She’d say “Take your time,” ‘cause time was on our side
Now the doors lock early and the town stays inside

     Repeat Pre-chorus

     Repeat Chorus

There were ghosts in the aisles long before she was gone
Seeking shade from the heat of a red Georgia dawn.
She’d stamp the cards gently, she’d ask how you’ve been
A shelter from the weather and the trouble you're in

I won’t sing of shadow, I won’t sing of blood
I’ll sing her name like a hymn in the flood
I’ll sing the way she handed hope across a desk
The simple, honest kindness that we easily attest

No, it ain’t the books that haunt that room at night
It’s the love she left there in the borrowed light
Let the pages hold her, let the pine wind tell
Somebody keep the quiet, somebody keep it well

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

Songwriter Note

I am a songwriter and a musician, but I'm not confident that I have the voice that's needed to inhabit these verses.

My hope is that these words eventually find an artist and storyteller to help me breathe life into them. If that collaboration never comes, I may record them myself rather than let them settle into silence.

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

Busy != Important

I am not naturally good at time management. I can make a list, rearrange the list, rewrite the list in a better app, and still end the day with the uncomfortable feeling that I mostly attended to noise. The inbox moved. The calendar happened. A dozen small things got handled. The important work, the thing I knew mattered before the day started, somehow survived untouched.

That is the trap. Busy feels defensible. Busy gives you evidence. Busy lets you point at a full calendar and say, "See, I did things."

But a full calendar is not the same as a useful day.

Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon professor best known for The Last Lecture, gave a famous talk on time management that included his adaptation of the Eisenhower/Covey Matrix. The model is simple: sort work by two questions.

  • Is it important?
  • Is it urgent?

That gives you four buckets.

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quadrantChart
    title The Eisenhower/Covey Time Management Matrix
    x-axis Not Urgent --> Urgent
    y-axis Not Important --> Important
    quadrant-1 Do It Now
    quadrant-2 Schedule It
    quadrant-3 Delegate It
    quadrant-4 Do Not Do It
    "Crisis deadline": [0.86, 0.86]
    "Family emergency": [0.76, 0.78]
    "Weekly plan": [0.22, 0.86]
    "Exercise": [0.18, 0.72]
    "Skill practice": [0.34, 0.66]
    "FYI meeting": [0.74, 0.34]
    "Low-value ping": [0.84, 0.22]
    "Feed refresh loop": [0.18, 0.12]

Task: A Practical Guide to Cross-Platform Build Automation

Task

make is still one of the most useful tools in a developer's toolbox, but a lot of modern repositories need something more portable, more readable, and easier to share between local development and CI. Task is a fast, cross-platform task runner that keeps the good part of a Makefile, one command for common project workflows, while replacing the rough edges with a YAML-based Taskfile.yml, built-in dependency orchestration, variables, templating, caching, and first-class behavior on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Field Dispatch: The First ESX Host Drifts from Custom Certificates After VMware Cloud Foundation 9 Instance Bring-Up

Effected Versions

  • VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1.x.x
  • VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.x.x

If you're using securitySpec to deploy VMware Cloud Foundation 9.x with external CA-signed ESX certificates, the bring-up can look successful while still leaving you with one surprise:

Post Deployment Configuration Drift

The first ESX host will be deployed with a VMCA-signed certificate instead of the external CA-signed certificate provided.

I ran into this while testing external CA-signed certificates through both the API and Ansible. The JSON payload was accepted, the instance bring-up completed, the ESX hosts retained their external CA-signed certificates except for first ESX host, the one used during the bootstrap for the vCenter appliance.

Tip: Using the GitHub CLI to Copy Labels Between Repositories

Tip

If you manage multiple GitHub repositories and want consistent labels, drift happens quickly.

Use GitHub CLI to run gh label clone and copy a source repository's labels into a destination repository.

If gh is not installed yet, install it first:

brew install gh

sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y gh

# RHEL
sudo dnf install -y dnf-plugins-core
sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo https://cli.github.com/packages/rpm/gh-cli.repo
sudo dnf install -y gh

# Fedora
sudo dnf install -y gh

winget install GitHub.cli

Then authenticate:

gh auth login
gh auth status

That second command is worth running. It confirms that your session is active before you try to modify repository settings.

Clone Labels into the Current Repository

If you are already in the destination repository directory, the command is simple:

gh label clone OWNER/SOURCE-REPO

Example:

gh label clone tenthirtyam/example

That copies every label from tenthirtyam/example into the current repository.

Target a Different Destination Repository

If you are not inside the destination repository, use --repo:

gh label clone OWNER/SOURCE-REPO --repo OWNER/DESTINATION-REPO

Example:

gh label clone tenthirtyam/source-example --repo tenthirtyam/destination-example