articles on Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer

🤖 This post includes some LLM-derived content 🤖 In a lot of organisations, you'll find a fairly consistent structure in teams' (GitOps) repositories, where they set up a branch per deployable environment, such as: * dev * staging * prod Within this struc…

A busy 4 day week On Monday, we had a chill bank holiday with a nice lunch at Mowgli It's been a very busy work week Thursday was releasing a few big bits, and a number of releases to Dev Platform as we closed off different pieces On Friday, with the APK…

I'm about to switch subscriptions for one of my Claude accounts, and as part of it, will lose access to any chats I had in the Claude.ai web view (and i.e. on apps, if I used them).

A busy week at work, publishing 10 advisories for Renovate, and working on a number of other bits As GitHub Stacked PRs now support Merge Queues, I've been using them a fair bit this week, mostly simplifying a number of things And it'll be interesting to…

🤖 This post includes some LLM-derived content 🤖 Since the availability of GitHub's Stacked PRs finally landing for repositories that use a Merge Queue, I've been "kicking the tyres" with some of my contributions to Renovate.

I spend a fair bit of my life reviewing code.

I'm regularly rewriting my history, often with the lens of improving my commit messages.

A busy week at work, juggling a few fairly complex things that have meant I've been a bit brain busy outside of work Wrote a couple of blog posts, Why I still hand write my commit messages being the main one, which got picked up later in the week, and end…

Sometimes, you create a branch off another branch, do some work on it, and want to know what the original branch was pointing at.

In this week's Fallthrough podcast episode, I joined Kris Brandow and Matthew Sanabria to talk about a few things, but mainly the new Go proposal proposal.

As I've blogged about before, I've written a tool for improving the experience of working with Renovate's debug logs, providing a more targeted experience for viewing the logs.

For over a decade, I've been a proponent of writing detailed Git commit messages.

The main thing this week has been GopherCon UK - an expensive week, and unfortunately not as good as previous years - but you can see my writeup for more info On Tuesday night when I got in, I went over to Monohon Ramen which was nice Met some nice folks…

For the 3rd year running, I've been at GopherCon UK and am surprised to have survived the heat in London - highs of 36 degrees yesterday - but thankfully The Brewery is a lovely and cool event space.

🤖 This post includes some LLM-derived content 🤖 In the Renovate project, we use the Merge Queue to merge PRs.

Ditto to last week: still not finished my Canada blog post Was a bit of a busier week with Anna in the office for a good chunk of the week And a pretty intense week at work on top of that 😬 Continuing to try and refine the plan Claude needs to implement f…

Ditto to last week: still not finished my Canada blog post Work's been particular busy this week with various bits going on, and an accidental major release And as it'd been a pretty intense week, Friday was a little bit more a "catch your breath" day whe…

🤖 This post includes some LLM-derived content 🤖 I've been recently thinking about how Open Source maintenance seems to be becoming a little more a slog recently - largely with the increased amount of contributions possible with AI agents - and how it impa…

When contributors raise PRs to Renovate, there are times where they'll merge main into their PR while they're waiting for a merge.

A busy week at work Got accepted to the Claude for Open Source program I've been looking, again, at rewriting my Micropub endpoint - it's been a long time on my list but I've never sat down with the time to do so - I'd like to get it into a nice place, but

🤖 This post includes some LLM-derived content 🤖 I've recently been using the pattern I described to combine Renovate and Vendir to sync files in a number of repos, as a means to track OpenAPI spec dependencies.

A busy week back at work, catching up on what I'd missed, doing some decision making + Product-y thinking A fair bit of stuff to catch up did make it a slightly stressful start to the week, though Had a fun time at the GitHub Secure Open Source Fund's "Red

(Full Canada holiday writeup to come) Got ~1 hour sleep on the plane, and ~1 hour in the cab home, so didn't get going to pick up Cookie right away from Anna's parents - but after some caffeine I was ready to drive us to pick up Cookie Then Cookie decided…

(Full Canada holiday writeup to come) Reading: Tiamat's Wrath Leviathan Falls Watched: The Drama (2026) Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022) Switzerland vs Algeria (World Cup 2026) Canada vs Morocco (World Cup 2026)

A busy week before our trip to Canada 🎉 (Full Canada holiday writeup to come) It was very toasty this week As a way to reduce the overall heat, I ended up leaving my PC off while working, and found that worked quite well - but does mean I need to listen to

Enjoyed the last of the Selkirk Bannock A busy week catching up, dealing with a bit of fallout while I was OOO, picking up a few high-priority bits and doing some product-y evaluation of our backlog Some more good work on rootly-go this week oapi-codegen's

🤖 This post includes some LLM-derived content 🤖 Let's say that you're trying to determine what percentage of your work is using AI - for instance as part of a performance review - how would you go about doing that?

A lovely week in Scotland at No. 2 Braefoot Cottage, which I very much recommend!

A busy week ahead of a holiday away in Scotland Thinking about pausing my Changelog++ subscription, as right now there's not really much happening Changelog wise, which is a shame A nice dinner at Everyday People with Carol, Alan and Nisha - a bit loud (w…

A nice relaxed Bank Holiday Monday We spent the day mostly trying to hide from the heat - highs of ~32 made it rather toasty Glad I did the decking on Saturday/Sunday, as it was so toasty And playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 almost all the day - contin…

My friend Alan wrote yesterday in a thread on Bluesky: In my end-of-year review I was described as a 'craft engineer' more than once.

It's heating up this week, and tomorrow is going to be ~33!

Got my job title changed at work, covering the role I do have and the work I'm doing (but no update to /salary/) which is cool!

This week I joined Kris Brandow on the Fallthrough podcast, talking about a mix of things.

Over the last few years, I've spent time working on projects like dependency-management-data with the intent that I could provide visibility into organisational usage of dependencies and insight into how outdated they are, which continues with working ups…

In the last month I've found I've been hyper aware of noticing folks writing open-source everywhere I look, which feels like there's something slightly larger at play.

A very short workweek, with Bank Holiday Monday, the GitHub Maintainers Summit and Matt's funeral on Thursday Had a chilled Bank Holiday Monday Was nice to be invited to the GitHub Maintainers Summit, and found it a good time!

Earlier today I was working with a Yarn codebase for the first time on one of my machines, and I hit an awkward error I'd not seen before: % yarn install yarn install v1.22.22 error Error: Failed to replace env in config: ${NPM_TOKEN} at /usr/lib/node_mod…

A fairly busy week at work, and a mix of getting stuff done across the Open Source world In Renovate: Finished off the ability to make it so Renovate only provides updates to Go modules within your go directive, which we've wanted for oapi-codegen - alrea…

In the Go ecosystem, there are two key parts of the go.mod to note (aside from the dependencies themselves) which are the go and toolchain directives.

A pretty intense environment this week, so not too much else done outside of work Another episode of Fallthrough - this time a bit more random in what we covered, but good Tried making sweet and spicy Korean chicken - wasn't quite right in terms of measur…

This week I joined Kris Brandow on the Fallthrough podcast, somehow talking about even more topics than last week.

Last week, I was tagged in a LinkedIn post, where one of the Python Core developers was noting that Astral's setup-uv GitHub Action was not being updated by either Renovate or Dependabot, and a note to users that they would need to manually update.

A busy week at work Was pretty chuffed with myself when I saw a nudge about astral-sh/setup-uv not being updated by Renovate (since the move to Immutable Releases) and I was able to solve it pretty quickly, showing some good speed of reaction compared to…

This week I joined Kris Brandow and Ian Lopshire on the Fallthrough podcast to talk about a tonne of topics, including AI, Claude Mythos, why frontend engineering is harder than backend engineering, a preview of a proposed talk to GopherCon UK "A little d…

As I've been working more with Typescript - especially with Renovate - I've been feeling the need to finally invest in getting a debugger set up.

A 3 day week, with Easter Monday and a recharge day at work A busy week at work, continuing on protecting our users from malicious packages Including a short-term fix using OSV data, and a longer-term solution planned that I'm working through which will p…

I work with quite a few OpenAPI specs, and have found it useful to be able to keep an eye on what's changed over time.

Something I've been meaning to write about since November 2024 is how to create an external command for diffing between files with git diff.

Week Notes are later than usual because we were binging Last One Laughing UK, and enjoyed going to bed late with it being a bank holiday A fairly busy week at work, getting some more things in place to block malicious packages from being picked up by Reno…