March 2026 on GitHub: gh-observer Enters the Room

February was data-curated’s month; March belonged to gh-observer. Fifty-four pull requests into the repo, a 2,000-line announcement post, and the thing I’d been building since the year before went public. Waiting for CI is now somebody else’s misery.

By the Numbers

The robot didn’t file any PRs this month because it got a different job: the data updates moved to a nightly GitHub Actions run at 11am UTC — scheduled so the graphs are done before I wake up on the West Coast. That’s either a promotion for the robot or a hostile takeover of its job, depending on your feelings about cron. Also new on the board: two PRs into what would eventually become ctm. Small then. Notable later.

Elsewhere

Two more PRs into DNSControl, continuing the standing appointment from January and February. The good one: #4173 — every provider doc now includes its feature flags automatically, generated from the code instead of hand-maintained, an eight-comment thread and a merge. Docs that update themselves beat docs that are merely correct. The other one, #4172, was closed without merging — the maintainers keep me humble, which is exactly what a good upstream relationship is for.

Releases Shipped

Two repos hit v1.0 in the same month

fini-coredns-example v1.0 landed March 8 — the demo project that started as presentation notes six months earlier, now a versioned, podman-documented adult. And google-plus-posts-dumper v1.0 arrived March 18 — the social-network archiver reaching its own v1.0, complete with canonical URLs and the canonical “we archivists do it for posterity” energy.

Also shipping

The site’s v2026.02 wrapped the parking post and emoji work, and template-repo v1.3 kept the shared machinery current.

Notable Pull Requests

www-chicks-net #307: announcing gh-observer

1,441 additions and 623 deletions for the announcement post — the launch post for the TUI that watches CI so you don’t have to, complete with terminal screenshots and a startup-delay story. Fifty-four gh-observer PRs went into the product that month; this one went into telling people it existed. Shipping is only half the job.

data-curated #203: analyze code reviews

1,458 additions — the month’s biggest diff — building the code-review analysis pipeline, and the most-discussed PR of the month with ten comment rounds. My repo about my GitHub activity now includes analysis of the code reviews on my GitHub activity. Recursion is a lifestyle.

www-chicks-net #309: the quote file moves in

525 additions migrating my long-maintained quote file — the quote-file project, quotes collected over more years than I care to admit — into the site’s reference section, with an eight-comment thread workshopping how to present a couple hundred quotes without scaring people off. The reference section of this site keeps quietly absorbing the stuff I’ve carried around for decades.

template-repo #111: zizmor competes with actionlint

40 additions and 38 deletions adding zizmor alongside actionlint for workflow security scanning — and the security bots came out for this one, with GitHub’s Advanced Security bot joining Claude in the comments. Two reviewers, both artificial, entirely on-brand for this workflow.

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; the numbers came straight from GitHub’s API via the gh CLI 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.