I maintain a couple of IRC bots that help out with Wikimedia devops tasks. Jouncebot was a bot I started helping with when @mattofak moved on to other projects. Later I developed Stashbot as a replacement for using the Logstash that collected data for my SAL tool in Tool Labs.

Both bots are built using the awesome irc python library from Jason Coombs. I've copied various core irc behaviors from one bot to the other as I've discovered and fixed various bugs in how I was using the library. I finally got around to extracting these core parts into a Python library of it's own that I have named "IRC Bot Behavior Bundle" or IB3 for short.

I fell down a rabbit hole a few days ago. I wanted to write a blog post about my new irc library, but the rbenv I had setup to run Octopress was all messed up. I stated poking around to try and remind myself how to get it working again and eventually decided that I should really look for a new static site generator written in language that I like to use. I ended up picking Pelican.

I wanted to make my own build of Textual the other day and needed a code signing certificate to complete the build. I decided to make single, long-lived certificate to that I could reuse for building multiple applications.

GitHub profile pages include a neat visualization of commit history that they call the "contributions calendar". This 53x7 grid shows the number of commits and other GitHub interactions that the user performed on each day for the last year.

Each cell in the graph is shaded with one of 5 possible colors. These colors correspond to the quartiles of the normal distribution over the range [0, max(v)] where v is the sum of issues opened, pull requests proposed and commits authored per day.

I was inspired by Ivan Zuzak's post to try using GitHub issues on the repository for this blog to collect and display reader comments. I'm using Octopress to generate the site, so I decided to make some customizations to make applying Ivan's ideas easy for me.

I started by adding a new configuration setting to my _config.yml file: github_comments: true. I'll use this configuration switch to turn the new feature on in other places in the codebase.