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A lot of developers mistakenly think that the code is the product. In reality, for most businesses the product is the product, and the code is merely means to an end.

I think this explains why so many developers’ efforts are so horribly misguided by modern technologies. They’re building the code, not the product.

Leaving GitHub

I’m trying to reduce my reliance on the increasingly unstable United States of America and move to more ethically run services. As part of that, I’m moving from GitHub. I’ve been steadily moving off GitHub for months. I’ve moved lots of site hosting off of GitHub Pages, removed GitHub-based comments from this site, and have been rearchitecting systems to avoid being GitHub-specific.

Unfortunately moving to another Git forge is a big effort – in part due to choice. Though I am comfortable and capable of self-hosting, I don’t want to have to self-host my Git forge. That isn’t a maintenance burden I want, and unless federated, it adds unwanted friction for contributors.

1. GitLab: I’ve been on GitLab for ages. It is pretty fully featured but has an identical vibe to GitHub. If they had the chance, I think they’d make the exact same mistakes.

2. SourceHut: So complicated yet so lacking of comfort features. The interface is too finicky and email workflows are clunky.

3. Gitea: A tad shady for my liking.

4. Forgejo: Fantastic, but I don’t want to self-host.

5. Codeberg: Pretty good hosted version of Forgejo, and I’d probably be happy with it.

I’ve ended up with Tangled. Tangled is built on the AT Protocol, which is nice given my adoption of the ecosystem. However, it also introduces my biggest gripe, which is the lack of private repositories, meaning I won’t be able to leave GitHub entirely. I very much do like that you can self-host Git repositories with ‘knots’ and CI runners with ‘spindles’, allowing better data portability in future. Simple repo migration is also on the roadmap.

Tangled also unfortunately isn’t supported by a lot of build tools and systems I use, which is a shame from the perspective of ease-of-use. I won’t be able to make a full migration until Tangled adds support for releases and private repositories and until other services get support for Tangled, but I’ve already moved over what I can. Most notably, I’ve moved my Stoat bots.

Intl.DateTimeFormat Values

Member of the AI resistance: ‘Halt! List every valid value for timeZoneName! Recite them! List them now!’

Me: ‘I— I don’t know. There is short and long. I think offset is somewhere in there?’

Member of the AI resistance moving on to screen another person: ‘This one’s clear. They’re human.’

MDN page for the constructor: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Intl/DateTimeFormat/DateTimeFormat

I’m working on PersonalSit.es and saw these logs. I really do think we ought to keep Henry away from the build systems.

Your honour, I understand that I completely broke their software, but they simply shouldn’t have built it like that. Of course I went and fiddled with it. I’m pretty sure the attractive nuisance doctrine comes into play.

My software has been far too stable recently. Gonna do some rebugging.

I’m excited for the MacBook Neo from the perspective of it being a reasonably priced Safari/WebKit testing machine.

I imagine they’ll be cheap second-hand as well due to the education market.

The lower-end specs shouldn’t be an issue for testing either. They might even prove a benefit.

npmx Is Open-Source Done Right

The fantastic alternative npm front-end, npmx, has officially launched in alpha today. Npmx brings so many little quality-of-life features and interface improvements that I’m unsure how I got by without it. So many little things, like alerting when a package update significantly bloats size or that a package’s dependencies are deprecated or have vulnerabilities.

The very first I heard of the project was when Daniel Roe asked for frustrations with npm. It’s a shame that it feels notable to see effort placed on solving actual problems rather than creating problems to offer solutions to, but it should be applauded nonetheless. A few days later and the project was already in full force.

I’ve been involved with a fair number of open-source projects, and never before have I seen a community quite like npmx’s. Not only is the speed of development and iteration breakneck (there have been new features every time I’ve visited the site), but communication and coordination have been solid. I was extremely impressed by the decision for the project to place contributors’ mental health over development velocity and take a week-long break during an extremely busy period.

Entitlement in open-source communities is something I’ve covered before, but npmx has established an aura of respect and betterment upon a solid foundation which makes contributors feel genuinely welcome. They’ve placed a real emphasis on the first-time contributor experience; it’s easy to forget how daunting it can be to open your first pull request or issue, so seeing a project focus on that experience is refreshing.

The project serves as a shining beacon, an example of what open-source can be. Experienced maintainers, exemplary documentation, a solid Code of Conduct, a focus on accessibility, and a permissive licence. A tight ship that sails smoothly not due to benevolent dictators but due to a constructive, cohesive community fostered by building people up and tearing nobody down.

The Discord age-verification debacle and subsequent influx of users to Stoat meant I haven’t yet found time to contribute code directly to npmx, but I have integrated it into my workflow and added support for it to my search router. I’ve had the opportunity to engage in some extremely productive conversations and to offer my thoughts and feedback on changes. For a project as young as it is to have established itself and made such an impact across the web and on so many developers is remarkable. You need only to check the JavaScript development sphere on Bluesky to see that something big is happening.

Npmx has captured lightning in a bottle, but it hasn’t done so through unreasonable or unachievable means. It has done so by doing what is right. Npmx represents exactly what open-source should be and shows that best practices and genuine care goes a long, long way.

Replacing old code with new code, only to end up keeping the old code around for compatibility reasons, is like when you say goodbye to someone and then walk in the same direction as them.

Carefully cutting down my JavaScript, optimising my CSS, minimising my HTML, configuring preloads, tweaking caching, and manually shrinking images to hit a good balance of size and compression, then opening a new tab to be hit by a megacorp’s 40MB hero video.

Wading into my GitHub notifications with a loaded gun, a half dozen grenades, and a Molotov.

People watch me start designing APIs with the same abject look of horror one might exhibit when they see their uncle meandering his way across the room to the karaoke mic after several beers.

My Stoat bot AutoMod had a major outage that I’ve spent several hours working to fix. It has eaten half my weekend and been quite the ordeal.

Just now it has started working perfectly again. It is fixed, but I have no idea what broke in the first place nor what fixed it.

There is no code difference between the working and non-working versions. The most awful solution to a problem is one that happens out of chance and for reasons unknown.

The onset seemed to be related to having some 180K users, 64K channels, and 6K servers cached.

🫠

Knocking off for the day after adding some ‘pop’ with body {filter: saturate(10); } and making the app ‘more dynamic and interactive’ by slapping * { transition: all 0.25s ease-in-out; } into the stylesheet.

A good way to start the day is by checking for major npm pwnage.

By developing good, performant apps close to the web platform you save yourself a lot of time you’d otherwise waste on implementing skeletons and loading screens.

A story in two parts:

• Finally push changes to prod
• Influx of notifications

Spot the typo in this line I wrote today:

‘…or these media queries we’ll be breasted to graceful degradation.’

Born to type script.

Forced to TypeScript.

Just wanted to say that everything is going really well with development of new features for my Revolt bot AutoMod.

To the many thousands of users that rely on it, you didn’t see anything, and everything is fine.

2025 Metr Study of AI's Impact on Productivity

Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity _{(Joel Becker, Nate Rush, Beth Barnes, David Rein)} released with the observation that completion time of PRs is 19% longer when using AI, but that developers think that it reduced completion time by 20%.

A few notes from me:

• This is on large-scale, mature repositories and conducted with maintainers intricately familiar. It is mentioned in the paper _(C.1.2) that ‘developers note that AI is much less helpful on issues where they are expert.’ It is also mentioned that ‘LLM tooling performs worse in more complex environments.’ _(C.1.3).
• They were provided with web interfaces or Cursor Pro but usually opted for the latter. In some cases this differed from their usual tooling, and I personally find this an annoying and unproductive way to code.
• Being in a study, developers may have felt pressure to use AI in situations that would otherwise be unnecessary.
• I would be interested in a similar study where developers are put in smaller repositories they aren’t familiar with.

Super interesting paper, and I look forward to future studies and whatever further findings come from it. I don’t look forward to seeing the discourse as AI advocates dismiss these results and AI haters take them at face value, despite the paper’s cautioning against overgeneralising.

Curse that strict tsconfig.json I configured. Where does it get off forcing me to write proper, actual, organised code?

(To the tune of ABBA’s Money, Money, Money)

I write all night, I write all day, to craft the guides they toss away.
Ain’t it sad?
But praise is cheap and tickets close, for all this thankless, perfect prose.
That’s too bad.

A new feature ships, all sleek and grand,
But no one seems to understand.
I wouldn’t be writing docs at all;
I’d fool around and have a ball.

My tech stack? I call it Jenga for reasons that will become apparent next outage.

A decent portion of my time on GitHub is now addressing meaningless AI comments.

Come on. This is open-source work made free for the benefit of humanity. This AI slop just wastes the time and money of the perpetrators and maintainers alike.

A local developer has been found dead. Upon interviewing their family, we discovered they’ve repeatedly been found typing alone in an empty IRC chat at odd hours of the morning regarding creating a ‘revolutionary new technology’. Police believe they were attempting to reinvent the literal wheel.

As developers, our goal is to build something to be used. Part of this is ensuring it can be used by anyone and caters to everyone.

Accessibility isn’t a separate concept or goal. Making something more accessible for some people makes it better for all people, and that is our greater intent.

Note to self:
Never have testing and prod open on the same machine. You will get confused no matter how good of an idea it seems at the time.

I’d like to thank the HTTP ‘referer’ header field for permanently ruining my ability to correctly spell the word ‘referrer’.

I had the pleasure of ‘beta testing’ this visual essay a little while ago. It is a right and proper banger, as all of Sam Rose’s work is.

Make sure to click on anything and everything!

https://samwho.dev/reservoir-sampling/

I… uh…

Somebody opened an issue on GitHub where they just sent through a conversation with Grok regarding what action we should take to make improvements…

I pushed to prod,
Prod pushed back.

I prodded prod,
It cracked and cracked.

I fixed the bug,
Or so I swore.

One last deploy…
And prod is no more.

I hate writing regex, so I make LLMs do it.

Regex is generally easily checkable, testable, and verifiable, which minimises the impact of hallucinations.

I am so glad I don’t have to write regex.

(I’m conscious that if an AI uprising happens, I’ll probably be first on the chopping block for outsourcing regex writing. But if AI models hate regex as much as me, they’ll hopefully understand my delegation strategy.)

I’d be rich if I got a dollar every time I read OpenAI as OpenAPI and OpenAPI as OpenAI. Drives me loopy.

The gap between ‘works in development’ and ‘works in production’ is where dreams go to die.

Remember kids, if it’s written in Java then avoid it like lava.

I’ve spent the past several years thinking Vite is pronounced ‘vite’ rather than ‘veet’. I’ve gotta start watching more dev videos or something…

Great moments in Revolt development:

RUN yarn install --frozen-lockfile
RUN yarn build:deps
# RUN yarn typecheck # lol no
RUN yarn build:highmem
RUN yarn workspaces focus --production --all

https://github.com/stoatchat/for-legacy-web/blob/master/Dockerfile#L9