November walked back a CDN; December went big instead. One hundred twenty-seven pull requests, every last one merged — and one of them was, by a factor that embarrasses the rest, the largest PR of my entire year: a hundred and sixty-seven thousand lines of Google+ content, imported into this blog. Nostalgia, it turns out, has a diff size.
By the Numbers
| Metric | Count |
|---|---|
| Pull requests opened | 127 |
| … merged | 127 |
| … still open | 0 |
| … closed without merging | 0 |
| Issues opened (per my GitHub profile) | 91 |
| Commits (per my GitHub profile) | 131 |
| PR reviews given (per my GitHub profile) | 0 |
| Repos touched | 19 |
| Releases published | 9 |
| Bot-filed data updates | 0 |
Another perfect merge month — the second in a row, which either says
goodbye to 2025 politely or means the quality bar survived the
holidays. The row that jumps out is issues: ninety-one opened, the
biggest planning month of the whole run. December was for writing
things down so the new year would know what to do. The busiest PR
repos were google-plus-posts-dumper (29), data-curated (22), this
site (20), and quilt-shop-proximity (13).
Elsewhere
Two more merges into DNSControl — the upstream habit now three months old. #3860 refreshed the DigitalOcean provider docs, and #3909 removed underscores from filenames for consistency. That second one has a punchline: the rename broke some doc links, which I would end up fixing upstream myself in February. My chore caused my chore. Open source is a small town.
Releases Shipped
The December wave
Nine releases to close the year, including a stack of version-number milestones: emoji-bag v1.0, fini-domain-trust v1.0, fini-projects v1.0, and chicks-home v42.0 — the v42 line beginning exactly where you’d expect it to. Plus fini-infra v4.0, template-repo v1.1, data-curated v0.5, google-plus-posts-dumper v0.7, and presentation-notes v2025. A December release wave is my version of holiday cards.
Notable Pull Requests
www-chicks-net #198: importing the Google+ archive
167,920 additions and 648 deletions. One hundred sixty-seven thousand
lines — every salvaged post from a decade on Google+, parsed, cleaned,
front-mattered, and imported into the blog in one PR. The
google-plus tag now has more posts than some categories I actually
maintain on purpose. This is the PR the dumper below was born to
enable, and it remains the single largest diff of my year.
google-plus-posts-dumper #24: the parsing engine
431 additions completing the post-parsing infrastructure and Markdown generation — the engine room of the big import. The repo did twenty-nine PRs this month, going from idea to v0.7 release to “we have successfully archived a dead social network” in about four weeks. Archivists gonna archive.
fini-infra #69: an OpenSearch cluster for web logs
659 additions standing up an OpenSearch cluster for the web logs — with a nine-comment thread, the longest of the month, working through how the logging pipeline should actually connect. When your sites start generating enough traffic to need log search, that’s either success or a very chatty 404 page.
data-curated #32: the jackpot-checker
696 additions tracking lottery jackpots, with syslogd and JSON logging options, because even my gambling side quests get production-grade observability. The most important lesson of a data engineering career: if you track it, it becomes a dataset, and I regret nothing.
fini-net/quilt-shop-proximity: a new project appears
Thirteen PRs to close the month: a Godot skeleton with an iOS location plugin, a sqlite database prepared and geocoded to 100% via OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim API, quilt shops pulled from vcq.org and the web, California and Virginia merged into one database. The essential question this app answers — “where is the nearest quilt shop?” — may be the most wholesome query any of my projects has ever serviced.
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 December 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.