December closed out with nine releases; January opened with something even better: a month where every single pull request merged. One hundred and thirty opened, one hundred and thirty merged. Either I was right about everything or nobody was arguing. Let the record show I’m choosing to interpret this as competence.
By the Numbers
| Metric | Count |
|---|---|
| Pull requests opened | 130 |
| … merged | 130 |
| … still open | 0 |
| … closed without merging | 0 |
| Issues opened (per my GitHub profile) | 39 |
| Commits (per my GitHub profile) | 132 |
| PR reviews given (per my GitHub profile) | 0 |
| Repos touched | 14 |
| Releases published | 8 |
| Bot-filed data updates | 0 |
The busiest repos were template-repo (29 — the gh-process machinery
grinding forward), data-curated (18), and macaw (15 — more on the
new bird in a moment). Note the reviews-given row still reads zero in
January; by summer I’d be reviewing a hundred-plus PRs a month. The
robot-review workflow that explains that jump has its origin story
right here in this month’s notable PRs.
Elsewhere
This is the part of January I’m most pleased about: five pull requests
into DNSControl/dnscontrol,
all merged. The DigitalOcean provider got self-documenting Cannot()
constructions for unsupported features, a corrected SOA support story
(disabled, then actually supported — the honest fix, in public), an
updated provider feature table, and a move of OWNERS to a proper
.github/CODEOWNERS that generated a ten-comment discussion — the
most-reviewed thread of my month, and every comment a human. In a
different repo, with different maintainers, being right isn’t enough;
you also have to be agreed with. They agreed. It’s a good feeling.
Releases Shipped
New projects check in
macaw v0.1 hatched on January 20 — a brand-new project that got the full fifteen-PR treatment in three weeks. And fini-clock got its Godot skeleton in the same month. Two new projects, one month, zero hesitation. Also google-plus-posts-dumper v0.9 landed on New Year’s Day, because nothing says “holiday” like archiving a dead social network.
The fleet
homebrew-chicks v0.1 and
v0.2 — a
brand-new tap, now with actual brew tests, an idea I wholeheartedly
endorse. data-curated v0.6 and
v0.7, which also
learned to analyze commits by time of day — because a data engineer’s
repo eventually turns its analytical instincts on itself, it’s only a
matter of time. Plus
template-repo v1.2
and the site’s own v2026.01,
the release that wrapped up months of blog work.
Notable Pull Requests
www-chicks-net #270: Zip is the King of Stealth File Formats
1,986 additions and 1,199 deletions — the single biggest PR of the month and, I’m fairly sure, the biggest blog post I’ve ever shipped. Zip Is King went up January 9 and then kept growing: a table of contents, a note that tar.gz is worse for developers (thanks, Lauren), and the genuinely delightful discovery that PyTorch packages are just zip files (thanks, Philip Brown). Three thousand changed lines for one blog post. The comments thread even had humans in it — a collector’s item.
template-repo #88: gh-process v5.4 applies copilot suggestions interactively
334 additions building the command that made AI review suggestions something you apply deliberately, one at a time, with judgment — instead of either ignoring them or cargo-culting the whole batch. This is the PR that started the workflow that would have me “reviewing” over a hundred PRs a month by July. I drew the line at interactive and I stand by it.
chicks-home #57: opencode moves in
239 additions installing OpenCode in the home repo — the month a second AI tooling system earned a place in the workflow. My home directory now has more onboarding documentation than some companies I have worked for.
homebrew-chicks #6: brew tests
54 additions adding brew test coverage to the fresh tap, because a
package manager repo that ships formulae it never tested is just
confidence with a YAML extension.
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; the numbers came straight from GitHub’s API via theghCLI on 2026-10-30. The review-cycle counts come from the actual PR comment threads, robots and all. - 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.