Last week my family and I went on a cruise to Alaska with four other families and we didn’t die. Not that we should expect to die on a cruise, but being confined with a bunch of kids on a giant hunk of steel has a way of making one consider one’s mortality.

The tagline for the Atom text editor is “A hackable text editor for the 21st Century”. As a Haack, this is a goal I can get behind.

Yesterday, the NuGet team announced that NuGet.org reached one billion package downloads!

As an open source maintainer, it’s important to recognize and show appreciation for contributions, especially external contributions.

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems. - Jamie Zawinski

Vacation, All I ever wanted
Vacation, Had to get away
Vacation, Meant to be spent alone
Lyrics by The Go Go’s

A long time request of http://semver.org/ (just shy of five years!) is to be able to link to specific headings and clauses of the Semver specification. For example, want to win that argument about PATCH version increments? Link to that section directly.

Over on the GitHub Engineering blog my co-worker Jesse Toth published a fascinating post about the Ruby library named Scientist we use at GitHub to help us run experiments comparing new code against the existing production code.

I have a big problem as a dad.

I planned to skip the tried and true year in review post because who reads such drivel anyways, amirite? They feel like one big exercise in vanity.

Like many developers, I have many strong opinions about things that really do not matter. Even worse, I have the vanity to believe other developers want to read about it.

GitHub Desktop, the application formerly known as GitHub for Windows, is a streamlined GUI that makes it easy to contribute to repositories on GitHub.

The TED Radio Hour podcast has an amazing episode entitled “The Meaning of Work”. It consists of four segments that cover various aspects of finding meaning and motivation at work. You should definitely listen to it, but I’ll provide a brief summary here of some points I found interesting.

The shaman squatted next to the entrails on the ground and stared intently at the pattern formed by the splatter. There was something there, but confirmation was needed. Turning away from the decomposing remains, the shaman consulted the dregs of a cup of tea, searching the shifting patterns of the swirling tea leaves for corroboration. There it was. A decision could be made. “Yes, this person will be successful here. We should hire this person.”

A while back I migrated my blog to Jekyll and GitHub Pages. I worked hard to preserve my existing URLs.

Writing extensions to Visual Studio is really hard. As in turn your hair gray hard. In fact, I now have gray hairs and I didn’t when I started the GitHub Extension for Visual Studio project (true story).

This past week I learned a new party trick. I can turn a holographic researcher beet red by simply referencing Tupac’s Hologram. It’s not because they identify strongly with East Coast hip-hop. Rather, it has to do with calling it a hologram in the first place.

Show of hands if this ever happens to you. After a long day of fighting fires at work, you settle into your favorite chair to unwind and write code. Your fingers fly over the keyboard punctuating your code with semi-colons or parentheses or whatever is appropriate.

The beads of sweat gathered on my forehead were oddly juxtaposed against the cool temperature of the air conditioned room. But there they were, caused by the heat of the CTO’s anger. I made a sloppy mistake and now sat in his office wondering if I was about to lose my job. My first full-time job. I recently found some archival footage of this moment.

This past week I had the great pleasure to speak in Puerto Rico at their TechSummit conference.