26 Aug 2026 · Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer
🤖 This post includes some LLM-derived content 🤖 Since the availability of GitHub's Stacked PRs finally landing for repositories that use a Merge Queue, I've been "kicking the tyres" with some of my contributions to Renovate . They're working mostly well so far, but I'm finding it a bit annoying trying to remember if I'm on a branch that's part of a stack. I'd started wiring this into my zsh config, still using Grml's zsh config as a base, and found it was a bit awkward. I decided to outsou…
25 Aug 2026 · Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer
I spend a fair bit of my life reviewing code. Even if you discount the increase in code review that comes from increased usage of the output from Large Language Models, I'm still doing a lot of code review. Not only am I doing internal code review at work, but as a maintainer on Renovate and oapi-codegen , I spend a lot of time reviewing community contributions, as well as those from our collaborators and maintainers. You can see how GitHub breaks this down on my GitHub profile : If you ignore m…
25 Aug 2026 · Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer
I'm regularly rewriting my history, often with the lens of improving my commit messages . On the Renovate project, we use a Merge Queue with Squash Merge, which means that if I do want to have atomic commits, I need to split them across PRs, which adds a bit of noise to manage them. Alternatively, I could bypass branch protection requirements to do a rebase merge, but that's the only way to do a rebase merge with a Merge Queue. Now that GitHub has launched stacked PRs , it's now possible to get …
23 Aug 2026 · Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer
A busy week at work, juggling a few fairly complex things that have meant I've been a bit brain busy outside of work Wrote a couple of blog posts, Why I still hand write my commit messages being the main one, which got picked up later in the week, and ended up being on the front page of Lobsters for just shy of 48 hours! I also discovered the selfh.st newsletter - thanks for featuring me! GitHub's outage on Monday was pretty counter-productive, and meant a large gap in being able to do anything …
23 Aug 2026 · Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer
Sometimes, you create a branch off another branch, do some work on it, and want to know what the original branch was pointing at. For instance, if you're looking to clean up your Git history , but don't want to rebase off origin/HEAD as you know there are some gnarly conflicts you may have to deal with, you want to know the last known "good" commit. I'd previously look down my commits, work out what the first commit was that didn't look like one of mine on this branch and refer to that SHA. Inst…
22 Aug 2026 · Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer
In this week's Fallthrough podcast episode, I joined Kris Brandow and Matthew Sanabria to talk about a few things, but mainly the new Go proposal proposal . I don't think this was a particularly good appearance from me - I'd been at GopherCon UK the few days before , and was very noticeably flagging 😅 This was very much on me for agreeing to try and squeeze it in, and I think if I'd have had one more sleep, I'd have been a bit more alive. Either way, I hope it's a good episode, and I know Kri…
20 Aug 2026 · Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer
Bookmarked Don't paste the AI. Post details If someone asks you a question, paste your answer — not the chatbot's.
17 Aug 2026 · Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer
Bookmarked And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway by Terence Eden Post details In early February 2011 Egypt was in the middle of a political revolution. One morning, everyone's phones suddenly pinged with an alert. The Armed Forces asks Egypt's honest and loyal men to confront the traitors and criminals and protect our people and honour and our precious Egypt. A series of messages arrived all ostensibly from the network provider Vodafone. All pro-regime and all with the…
17 Aug 2026 · Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer
As I've blogged about before, I've written a tool for improving the experience of working with Renovate's debug logs , providing a more targeted experience for viewing the logs. While there are a few options out there at the moment, including part of our products at Mend, it's also nice having an agnostic tool I can use across different products, or where a customer or a user has provided logs to us. Last week, I finally sat down to listing out some of the key improvements I'd like to have compl…
17 Aug 2026 · Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer
For over a decade, I've been a proponent of writing detailed Git commit messages. I find it a valuable use of my time, and continue to double down on it, even in a world where you can get a Large Language Model (LLM) to write it for you. In the past, I've written about at least 89 strong feelings I have about Git commits , so I'm naturally biased to the benefit of commit messages, but why does this still hold in the current age, where a lot of people are delegating that to an AI agent, if at all…
16 Aug 2026 · Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer
The main thing this week has been GopherCon UK - an expensive week, and unfortunately not as good as previous years - but you can see my writeup for more info On Tuesday night when I got in, I went over to Monohon Ramen which was nice Met some nice folks and had some good chats Went up to Smithfields Market to get a view of the eclipse, but as we didn't have glasses, didn't try and actually see it, but had the market obscuring it. Pretty cool experience, but better for folks who could see it saf…
14 Aug 2026 · Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer
For the 3rd year running, I've been at GopherCon UK and am surprised to have survived the heat in London - highs of 36 degrees yesterday - but thankfully The Brewery is a lovely and cool event space. I'm writing this on the train home, with a slightly tired voice, and a little tired after a good time - thanks again to the organisers for putting it on! How to Stay Passionate in the Age of AI Ainsley Clark kicked us off by talking about ways that we can stay passionate with the reshaping of our ro…
12 Aug 2026 · Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer
Reposted Kemal Akkoyun (@kakkoyun.me) Post details This author has chosen to make their posts visible only to people who are signed in.
12 Aug 2026 · Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer
I will be attending https://www.meetup.com/londongophers/events/315973770/ . I'm on the waitlist 🤞🏼
11 Aug 2026 · Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer
🤖 This post includes some LLM-derived content 🤖 In the Renovate project, we use the Merge Queue to merge PRs. If a PR fails its status checks, it will be pulled out of the Merge Queue, and a maintainer will need to re-queue it, if it is a transient error. For those of you unaware, GitHub are having a pretty hard time recently with outages , which means that we're seeing an increase in the number of PRs being pulled out of the Merge Queue due to transient errors due to GitHub's instability …
9 Aug 2026 · Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer
Ditto to last week: still not finished my Canada blog post Was a bit of a busier week with Anna in the office for a good chunk of the week And a pretty intense week at work on top of that 😬 Continuing to try and refine the plan Claude needs to implement for my Micropub rewrite Had a nice weekend down in London for my mum's birthday The a very bad drive down - took an extra ~90 minutes, including traffic as we were trying to get onto the M1 and by Hemel, with standstill traffic, and Waze think…
9 Aug 2026 · Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer
Do I know anyone who's going to Open Source Summit (Europe) in October and/or the OpenSSF Community Day ? Looking forward to attending my first one!
9 Aug 2026 · Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer
Reposted Mike Sheward (@SecureOwl@infosec.exchange) Post details unfortunately last night our AI model escaped its sandbox and gained access to a JIRA server, at which point it felt it best to return to it’s sandbox
2 Aug 2026 · Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer
Ditto to last week: still not finished my Canada blog post Work's been particular busy this week with various bits going on, and an accidental major release And as it'd been a pretty intense week, Friday was a little bit more a "catch your breath" day where I worked on a couple of bits, got Claude Fable to investigate some things for me (and it got some pretty good investigations, similar to what I would have done!) Had a nice massage on Friday, and a lil' mooch about town This week I've been th…
2 Aug 2026 · Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer
🤖 This post includes some LLM-derived content 🤖 I've been recently thinking about how Open Source maintenance seems to be becoming a little more a slog recently - largely with the increased amount of contributions possible with AI agents - and how it impacts being a maintainer. I'm very fortunate that my literal job is to be an Open Source project maintainer (among other things) and that it's a privilege not many others have. That being said, it still doesn't mean that undoes the amount of…