Weekly Changelog #4
Originally published on Substack.
Foreword
Longtime tech journalist Robert X Cringely passed away recently. His work has informed and delighted me throughout my entire career, most notably from his documentary Triumph of the Nerds (free on the Internet Archive) that did a bang-up job of documenting the early age of Silicon Valley, long before they were the world-dominating titans they are today. If you know/love Halt and Catch Fire, you’ll probably really dig that documentary, amongst his other works.
In other news, I am making the call: RIP Hacktoberfest, 2020-2026. While the inaugural launch of the program in 2020 was not without controversy, the program adapted and grew to be widely appreciated and supported by my measures. It was an opportunity for many small, single-contributor projects to gain exposure for additional bugfixes and input, and provided a soft ramp for newbies making their first public open source contributions (it can be nerve wracking!). For many of the past six years, I’ve used the program as an excuse to run mini Hacktoberfests at the organizations I work at to help upskill junior developers, spread the Good News about Free as in Beer software, and do a little self promotion.
All that is over though, due to the entirely predictable 2026 theme, “AI belongs to everyone”:
By joining Hacktoberfest, online or in-person, you can expect to learn about open-weight models, open source agents, and more. We believe open innovation must be prioritized alongside proprietary tools for an ecosystem to remain healthy and resilient. Instead of counting PRs, you’ll write your first skills.md, build your own open-source agent, fine-tune an open-weight model, or go wherever your curiosity takes you.
Don’t get me wrong - I don’t disagree with any of that, but I do think that replacing the old program with this is a mistake. I see an old man yelling at clouds when I look in the mirror, but I truly do think this works against a “health and resilient” ecosystem goal. Its how we get more slop, insecure software, and shoddy ports that aren’t maintained. I think stewardship, self-restraint, and asking if you should not only if you can are some of the important questions to focus on - ones that both big and small open source maintainers are still working through. And this mindset makes the problem worse, not better.
Changelog
setup-filemoverexpress
I just learned that AWS Labs open sourced their File Mover Express - a GUI cum CLI file mover to S3 that fills some major tooling gaps, particularly giving a lot of performance tuning knobs that only something like s5cmd could do prior, as well as having storage profiles. Check out the Choosing a Transfer Tool docs page to see the in-depth differences and if the tool is right for your use cases.
Installing a CLI as a one-off is trivial, but many actions like actions/setup-node end up being thousands of lines long to account for security, caching, version compatibility, and cross-os support. The effect is huge though - it becomes one thing that you never need to think too hard about when writing CI workflows.
My goal is the same here - make the install trivial, so you can focus on using the CLI to quickly and efficiently move files around. So far, this is the only utility for the File Mover Express CLI on the GitHub Actions Marketplace, so I took the time to spend some extra effort and time on the docs site to make sure it was exceedingly helpful and descriptive.
Check it out the first inaugural release of v0.1.0 on the GitHub Marketplace: Setup File Mover Express
lowly-writing-framework
A lot of small feature tweaks and fixes went out this week:
v4.4.0 - added more nuanced knowledge of mermaid diagram types, since the skill was only ever choosing to build flow charts.
v4.4.1 - categorically do not mention tests that CI exercises in the PR body.
v4.5.0 - utilize a staged pending review for pull request reviews.
v4.6.0 - review comments are anchored on the issue, and clarify proposed solutions are just that.
v4.7.0 - don’t try to ask a bot if the approach you took is good / for feedback.
tofu-garnish
This week v1.3.3 shipped which adds an input to specify a markdown docs dir, so that the tofu-garnish site includes static site versions of documentation. This makes the docs easier to view in context of specific values or configs.