Six years ago, David Thompson wrote a popular blog post called “My favourite Git commit” celebrating a whimsically detailed commit message his co-worker wrote. I enjoyed the post at the time and have sent it to several teammates as a model for good commit messages.

I recently revisited Thompson’s article as I was creating my own guide to writing useful commit messages. When pressed to explain what made Thompson’s post such an effective example, I was surprised to find that I couldn’t. It was fun to read as an outside observer, but I couldn’t justify it as a model of good software engineering.

Highlights

• I launched my first Kickstarter project and found Kickstarter surprisingly painless.
• I’m kind of on track to reach my Kickstarter goal, but I’ll need to get creative in raising the last 2/3rds.
• I’m soliciting suggestions for fun services to run on my 4x ARM CPU / 24 GB cloud server.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

I enjoy finding ways to exercise my rights as a consumer and push back against corporate abuse, so this was right up my alley.

The book was eye-opening and made me infuriated with how corrupt the medical system is in the US and how much it extracts wealth by fleecing the middle class.

I finally found a solution that makes VS Code work consistently with Zig, so I’m sharing my setup in the hope that it saves someone else a headache.

Before I landed on a working solution, I kept running into issues with Zig version mismatches or VS Code completely failing to recognize Zig semantics and failing over to naive autocomplete.

Highlights

• I’m having doubts about sitting out the AI revolution.
• I should prove to myself that customers are willing to buy my book before investing more time into it.
• I’m probably the last person on the planet to discover that RSS is a great way to read blogs.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: