This post is a response to some of the backlash we faced enabling stale bot on the nyc repo in IstanbulJS. I wrote these responses in the issue linked below, and I just wanted to thread it all here

As a maintainer/triager it’s overwhelming when there are many issues open because I don’t know at a glance what’s most important to people since I’m not on the project full time. In the short of amount of time since adding the stale bot we’ve seen some healthy movement IMHO because the people who have the most vested interest and are actively contributing are responding and helping move the project forward. One maintainer countered with this point:

Labels serve that purpose without sending users the message that you don’t care about their issue. https://github.com/istanbuljs/nyc/issues/515issuecomment-451716467

I don’t think that’s the message being sent. In fact, labels don’t create a...

Keybase.io is actually pretty great, for a lot of reasons that I won’t get into here. But as a GPG noob I couldn’t really find a how-to for moving from computer to computer, so I struggled at first to get my git commits signed properly when I got back to my old machine. But now I’ve got it down, so here we go! Disclaimer: I’m assuming you have OS X with Homebrew installed.

brew update && brew install git keybase gpg
keybase login
keybase pgp update  to add your new device to your keybase account
keybase pgp export | gpg --import
keybase pgp export -s | gpg --allow-secret-key-import --import

gpg --edit-key <your_email>
> trust
> 5  you should only give ultimate trust to your own key 
 after confirming
> quit

gpg --list-keys

The last command will give you what you need to follow these instructions to automatically sign all your commits.

Enjoy! The next TODO would probably be getting...

If you know about grunt and you’re like me and do a lot of your writing in Markdown, I’ve put together a “Writing Development Kit”. As far as I know no-one has beaten me to it, so I’m coining that phrase here and now! I’m using Brian Ford’s library ironically named write-good for prose checking, and using grunt to keep the checks going as I write. Yes, it may seem like reinventing the Microsoft Word wheel, but I strongly dislike Word which is justification enough.

Have a look at & download my gist to give it a shot. Getting started is easy:

$ npm install when the installation's done, you'll want to have/make some .md files for the prose checker to go through.
$ grunt

ét voilà! I’m using it with the Sublime Text EditorConfig and Grunt plugins installed in distraction free mode, and it’s fantastic. Enjoy, and feel free to leave comments here or on the gist itself!

Excellence is not a singular act but a habit. You are what you do repeatedly.

Shaquille O'Neal

Nostalgia is based on the fallacious notion that things were better in the past. They weren’t. You were younger, more innocent, less exposed to negative news reports and with a child’s inbuilt sense of loyalty, and so you remember it more favorably than it was. Trends show that things have always been on a steady pattern of improvement, with regards to technology, awareness of societal issues, equality, and the reduction of crime and global conflict. There may be more reportage of unpleasantness nowadays, but that doesn’t mean there was less unpleasantness in the past, just that we now have access to wonderful technology that allows more information on unpleasantness to be spread around.

- Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw