October built a CDN in twenty-five comments. November published the follow-up: “digital ocean CDN is not awesome.” Six lines changed, eight more comments, and honestly the most admirable engineering of the month — knowing when to walk something back. Infrastructure months have sequels now.
By the Numbers
| Metric | Count |
|---|---|
| Pull requests opened | 144 |
| … merged | 143 |
| … still open | 1 |
| … closed without merging | 0 |
| Issues opened (per my GitHub profile) | 4 |
| Commits (per my GitHub profile) | 146 |
| PR reviews given (per my GitHub profile) | 1 |
| Repos touched | 16 |
| Releases published | 1 |
| Bot-filed data updates | 0 |
The busiest repos were fini-infra (22), then a three-way tie at 17
apiece between mythical_person_month, this site, and template-repo
— a nice accidental snapshot of the fall: infrastructure, the book
project, the blog, and the machinery that runs it all. Also note the
reviews-given count: one. Singular. The first formal PR review of the
year, a baby step toward the robot-review-powered numbers you’ll see
in later months.
Elsewhere
One PR outside the family, and it’s a character study: a spelling improvement in the README of tucows’ interview-exercise repo — filed, and still sitting open, because sometimes you fix a typo in a company’s interview materials and the company never writes back. The PR remains on the books, patient, hopeful, a monument to upstream optimism.
Releases Shipped
One quiet release: fini-coredns-example v0.9 on November 1 — the gh-process v3.9 shellcheck cleanup riding along. The big v1.0 was still a few months out; sometimes version numbers, like the CDN, need a moment.
Notable Pull Requests
fini-infra #54: the CDN is not awesome
Six additions, one deletion, eight comments — the shortest PR with the longest title-to-diff ratio of the fall. This is the reversal of October’s 25-comment CDN build: after living with it, the verdict came in, and the verdict was “not awesome.” Engineering history is written by the people willing to write the retraction.
fini-infra #57: vccinc.net on the DigitalOcean app platform
256 additions standing up vccinc.net on DigitalOcean’s app platform,
with perlclass.org as the primary domain and a www alias — the
domain-trust sites getting real hosting after the CDN reconsidered its
life choices. Nine comments of back-and-forth, and the sites stand
because of it.
www-chicks-net #177: DEI equals American Values
1,571 additions and 109 deletions for the DEI equals American Values post — the most substantial blog PR of the month for the most words-likely-to-be-misunderstood post of the year. Plus a retagging pass on the older Microsoft monopoly report, because posts about monopolies and posts about values turn out to share a shelf.
mythical_person_month: the book learns to illustrate
The Mythical Man-Month project rolled on — seventeen more PRs this month, now extracting and documenting the chapter illustrations, and finding modern links for the ancient references, which for a 1975 book is basically archaeology with hyperlinks. Brooks cited things by publication; the web needs URLs; the book now has both.
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-recapskill, retroactively — the numbers came straight from GitHub’s API via theghCLI on 2026-10-30, looking back at November 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.