I was reading the other day a nice blogpost by Matthew Garret (mjg59) about being able to use SSH keys to sign Git commits. While trying to make that set up in my machine I realized there are some tricks I use to configure the Git repository identities I had not spoken about before, so I’m going to merge both topics.

If you are only interested in the SSH signing, you can check mjg59’s post above and Caleb Hearth’s. If you want my usual ramblings, keep reading.

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As perks of the job, I tend to find myself having to maintain old code bases with many outdated dependencies. That is quite usual, but turns to be specially painful when you need to update a core dependency and every other thing starts breaking due to API changes. This has happened to me in 2 workplaces, first in Ruby on Rails, and latest in the infrastructure scripts written in Python 2.

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Project management is a basic necessity of developing software (and things that are not software). As I use Emacs throughout the development cycle I also need to control projects from there. I’m sharing here a transient I wrote to help me learn to write transients and to use these better.

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I have seen a rise in the number of opinionated tools present in the common mindspace in the last decade. These tools usually cause controversy by limiting user choice and following a set path through problem space. But why have they become popular? Why are they “better”?

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We started a book club at work at the end of 2020 and the first book we went over was the extremely famous Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler.

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This blog is now hosted in srht.site. This is the static site hosting provided by sourcehut, a very opinionated software forge with many integrated services.

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I try to keep track of improvements in the projects I depend on the most, and sometimes I even track their development with the hopes of being able to contribute something back. One of such projects (though contributing back directly is pretty unlikely so far) is Emacs, and I build it locally to get the big improvements early on.

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Using Emacs, you eventually need to learn Emacs Lisp (elisp) as everything is written in that language. Configuration is also in elisp, but usually requirements are minor enough not to need much learning. I’ve tried to learn it several times with low success, but recently I got to write a helper for myself that I think is worth sharing. This is just beginner stuff, and hopefully will help me remember how the bloody thing works :)

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I recently read Scott Berkun’s, “The year without pants”. For some reason I got the idea that the book was about how to work remotely, kind of a tips and tricks collection, which seemed on topic in the current pandemic situation. Nothing further from truth.

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October 6 - 7th 2020, originally in San Francisco (via Zoom). This is a conference about the development of OpenZFS, the Open Source implementation of ZFS. Originally developed by Sun and currently owned as proprietary code by Oracle.

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