Fixing a typo across multiple repos

Yesterday I found a typo in a pull request description while browsing another team’s project which I stumbled upon. I mentioned it to the author but it turned out that that part of the text came from the repository’s pull request template, which means every pull request will have this amusing but irritating mistake. I sent them a pull request, modifying the template, to fix the mistake at the source and avoid it in future, and thought that would be the end of it.

It turns out that template was written once and then copied across to new repos, which means this typo actually exists in almost all the pull requests in all of that team’s projects. Well that escalated quickly. This is the point where the average person probably says “OK whatever, it’s not worth it for something so small, there are too many repos, it’s just a small typo, never mind” and stop. A very determined person might actually start opening browser tabs and psyching themselves up to do pull requests. I open my terminal emulator and start writing a for loop. Continue reading

Packaging Wakatime CLI for ArchLinux

I’ve decided to give Wakatime a second try. It’s a tool that tracks the time you spend programming on different projects by integrating into your IDE. This works well for typical development work where you open your IDE in the morning and type code in it, do commits with it, and everything else related to the project and Wakatime will track that.

I don’t work like that though, so I had two issues with it last time, both resulting in a lower reported time spent working:

  • I spent most of the day working on different remote servers and it would be a hassle to set it up in the text editor on each of them and it would undoubtedly cause slowdown on the older servers
  • I use the command line tools as my IDE, so the time recorded opening the text editor to make some changes is not representative of the time spent working

This time it’s different because nowadays I virtualise most of the services I work with, using Docker on my local machine, and I’m hoping that using the Wakatime Z Shell integration will give a better record of time spent working on a project. Continue reading