Every month I merge a pile of pull requests, and every month most of them vanish into the ether without anybody noticing. Let’s fix that. This is the first of a series of monthly recaps of my public GitHub activity — numbers first, then the stories behind the interesting bits. Starting with September 2025 turned out to be a good call, because that month had a lot worth showing off.

By the Numbers

Metric Count
Pull requests opened 144
… merged 140
… closed without merging 4
… still open 0
Issues opened (per my GitHub profile) 7
Commits (per my GitHub profile) 148
PR reviews given (per my GitHub profile) 0
Repos touched 14
Releases published 2
Bot-filed data updates 0

A 97% merge rate either means my ideas were good or that nobody was standing in the way. History will decide. Notice what’s not in that table: robot paperwork. The daily data-update machinery wasn’t filing its own PRs yet, so all 144 of these have my fingerprints on them. Also, zero PR reviews given — the formal review counter sat at zero all month, a number that would top a hundred by summer. The Copilot-review workflows were just being born that month, right around the time I started checking Copilot suggestions after the GHAs finished. Simpler times.

The busiest repos were this very website (39 PRs — blogging about blogging is a proud tradition), fini-coredns-example (22), and emoji-bag (19 — yes, a whole month of Slack emoji packs for HangOps, NetworkToCode, haproxy, and friends; somebody has to keep the DevOps Slack game strong).

Releases Shipped

fini-coredns-example v0.7 and v0.8

The big story of the month was fini-coredns-example, a worked example of running CoreDNS in containers with dnscontrol. v0.7 landed September 1 with the polish pass — a debug recipe, container labels, security-policy wording, auto-assign. v0.8 followed September 10 as the maturation: podman documentation, GHCR login via 1Password, real Go-based tests, and Claude adoption. A project that went from outline to mailing-list announcement in one month — the announcement post is over here if you’re curious what the CoreDNS crowd made of it.

Notable Pull Requests

www-chicks-net #106: How Rust Had to Save Python From Itself

The biggest diff of the month by a mile: 722 additions and 136 deletions of what became the uv post. I wrote about the Rust-ification of Python packaging, published it September 4, and watched it take on a life of its own — the response was genuinely incredible, big enough that I added a follow-up PR later in the month just to link the LinkedIn version from the post. Writing one thing people actually read made the whole month feel validated.

fini-coredns-example #19: implement testing in golang

373 additions that turned the demo project from “clever script” into “software that gets tested.” Real Go tests for the demo, merged as part of the v0.8 release. If your example project doesn’t have tests, it’s just a rumor — this one stopped being a rumor in September.

www-chicks-net #130: a hugo shortcode for github repos

317 additions building the github_repo shortcode for Hugo — the little embed that renders repo cards right in the page. If you’ve read any of the reference pages on this site, you’ve seen its output. Infrastructure that outlives the month it was built in is the best kind.

megamap #14: removing the baggage

megamap is my LSI MegaRAID WWN-mapping tool from 2014 — old enough to be in middle school — and September 2025 was the month I dusted it off. This PR deleted 126 lines of accumulated non-Perl baggage to see if the repo would settle back into being Perl again. It’s not often you get to do archaeology on your own code and call it productivity.

fini-infra #22: terraform-ci

The most-commented PR of the month with seven comments, every one of them from robots — GitHub’s own Actions and Advanced Security bots showed up to the party. 184 additions wiring up terraform CI while the infra repo also grew a tfstate-bucket skeleton, tflint, and an Authelia SSO architecture diagram. The comments section being entirely machine-populated felt like a peek at the future, which of course it was.

Embedded Metadata

These are times where it seems good to be explicit about our choices about and usage of AI (Artificial Intelligence). Plus any links to cross-posts I do.

  • This post was drafted by GLM-5.3 in OpenCode using the gh-recap skill, retroactively — the numbers came straight from GitHub’s API via the gh CLI on 2026-10-30, looking back at September 2025.
  • The PR carrying this series was code-reviewed in CI by Claude Code — robots reviewing robots, which felt thematically correct.
  • The draft was reviewed and edited by me before publishing. The opinions, jokes, and any errors are mine.