Dispatches¶

Fare Thee Well

Please Format Your Code Blocks: GitHub Issue Etiquette

You are a maintainer. You have carved out thirty minutes between meetings to work through the open issues on your project. You open the first one. The title is promising. The reporter clearly hit a real bug. And then you see it: a wall of unformatted YAML, raw Terraform, and shell output, all smooshed together into a single paragraph, every newline stripped, every indentation gone, triple-quoted strings collapsed into nothing, angle brackets eaten by the Markdown renderer. You cannot tell where the config ends and the error begins.

You close the tab.

If you are a maintainer, you have lived that moment.

If you are a contributor, please keep reading, because this post is for you, and it will help your issues get more attention.

DCO vs CLA: Managing Contribution Agreements in Open Source

When you accept code contributions to an open-source project, you are entering a legal relationship with every contributor. Who owns the code? Do you have the right to relicense it? What happens if a contributor later claims you do not have permission to use their work? Two mechanisms exist to answer those questions before they become problems: the Contributor License Agreement (CLA) and the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO).

This post takes a thorough look at both: what they are, how they work, the tradeoffs involved, and the tooling available to automate enforcement on GitHub.

A Better Inbox for Pull Requests on GitHub

GitHub released a new Pull Requests dashboard in public preview at the end of March 2026. It replaces the existing pull request list at github.com/pulls with something that functions more like an inbox: a view that surfaces the PRs that actually need your attention rather than presenting every open PR you are associated with.

Why I Use JetBrains GoLand and PyCharm Over VS Code

VS Code is a remarkable editor. It is fast, extensible, and free, and it has become the default tool for an enormous portion of the developer community. I use it myself for PowerShell, general Markdown, and lightweight editing. But when I sit down to write Go or Python, GoLand and PyCharm are where I do my best work.

This is not a condemnation of VS Code. It is an explanation of why, for language-specific work, purpose-built IDEs make me a more productive and deliberate developer.

Light and Dark Mode Images in GitHub Markdown

GitHub renders Markdown with either a light or dark theme depending on the user's system or GitHub appearance settings. A logo or diagram that looks sharp on a white background can disappear entirely when the same user switches to dark mode. GitHub provides two ways to serve the correct image for each theme without JavaScript.

If you are using MkDocs Material, the same problem has a pure-Markdown solution covered in a companion post: Light and Dark Mode Images in MkDocs Material.

Light and Dark Mode Images in MkDocs Material

The MkDocs Material theme has built-in support for theme-aware images using standard Markdown syntax. No HTML is required.

Toggle the palette icon in the header to see the logo switch between its light and dark variants:

If you are using GitHub Markdown instead, see the companion post: Light and Dark Mode Images in GitHub Markdown.

T.J. Came Running

I was 13 the day I learned that love and safety were different things.

For years afterward, I remembered it as sounds. Not the worst sound, not even the one that should have mattered most, but the smaller ones that came before it, ordinary details preserved in perfect condition.

The bus brakes hissing on the county road.

The car engine idling with that low, stubborn tremor old engines have.

Gravel and clay ticking under the tires.

It was an afternoon like a hundred others, so ordinary it seemed beneath notice. Which is often how disaster arrives: without warning, dressed as routine.

How to Write an Effective GitHub Pull Request Template

Most pull requests arrive with a title, a branch name, and nothing else. The reviewer is left to reverse-engineer the intent from the diff, hunt through linked issues that may or may not exist, and ask follow-up questions before they can even start. That back-and-forth is a tax on everyone's time, and it is almost entirely avoidable.

A pull request template shifts the burden upstream. It prompts contributors at the moment they open a pull request to provide the context that reviewers need: what changed, why it changed, whether it breaks anything, and what issue it resolves. Done well, a template makes the review faster, the history more useful, and the project easier to contribute to.

This post covers what a pull request template is, how to set one up in a GitHub repository, and how to write one that contributors will actually fill out.

Branching Out: GitHub Certification Path

GitHub offers five certifications that validate skills across the full breadth of the platform: Foundations, Actions, Copilot, Advanced Security, and Administration. I completed each of these last year and found each one to be a genuine challenge that pushed me to revisit corners of the platform I thought I already understood.

This post walks through each certification, what it covers, how to prepare, and where to find the best study resources.