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Every Tuesday at 12pm Mountain Time

weekly-dev- chat logo

A casual weekly virtual chat mostly focused on web and software development.

Weekly Dev Chat is a place to ask questions, hear different viewpoints, and get to know your fellow developers. Every week there is an initial topic posted to get the discussion started. Sometimes we discuss the initial topic the entire chat, and other times the topic changes several times through the natural flow of the conversation.

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others.

What's happening with GitHub.

GitHub had quite a time last month:

April 23 (Merge Queue incident): A regression in the merge queue (especially with squash merges involving multiple PRs) caused incorrect merge commits. It affected 658 repositories and 2,092 pull requests. Changes from earlier merges were inadvertently reverted in some cases. No data loss occurred (commits were still in Git), but default branches ended up in inconsistent states for some repos. GitHub couldn’t auto-fix everything safely.

April 27 (Elasticsearch/search incident): The Elasticsearch cluster (used for search in PRs, issues, projects, etc.) became overloaded—likely from a botnet attack—and stopped returning results. This disrupted UI search features for several hours but didn’t affect core Git operations or APIs.

Others have commented on their recent decline (see chart below). Do you still trust them? Are you sticking with them, or exploring alternatives? Don’t forget... GitHub isn’t Git 😉 .

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Zoom link will be posted at 12pm MDT.

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Digital Spring Cleaning

Spring* is finally here! Well, hopefully. With that comes the time for spring cleaning. For me, that means outdoor tasks like getting the BBQ cleaned, prepping the garden, trimming the trees, and cleaning windows. I also try to use this time for digital cleaning, like unsubscribing from emails I no longer read, deleting apps and files I don't need, and deciding which projects need to be sunsetted.

This week's (2026-04-28) chat topic is digital spring cleaning. Do you do a digital spring cleaning? If so what do you delete, remove, and/or conclude? If not, then when do you do your digital cleaning? Are you one of those people that is constantly keeping your digital life clean and tidy?

Everyone and anyone is welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others.

*For those not in the Edmonton (YEG) area, spring means no snow and above-freezing temperatures (0 Celsius, 32 Fahrenheit). As of this writing, the last snowfall was April 26th at the airport.

**Image generated using ChatGPT. I like the happy positive vibes from the image.

Cheerful digital spring cleaning illustration

How Deep Should You Go?

Today’s chat (2026-04-21) we’ll talk about this ongoing debate between what you should know as a developer.

One side says: “Every programmer should learn C. Implement a linked list, hash table, and binary tree. Then build a simple CLI program and a basic network server. Not because you’ll use it daily, but because it strips away every abstraction you’ve been hiding behind and shows you what’s really beneath whatever language you use daily.”

Another side responds: “Every C programmer should write assembler. Every assembler programmer should write machine code. Every machine code programmer should design a chip. Every chip designer should work on a Turing ticker tape machine. Learn what you need for the level you work at. And a bit of what’s further down and further up the stack. For most people, linked lists are further down the stack than they need to venture.”

Who’s right? What has worked for you personally?

Everyone and anyone is welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others.

Close-up of ticker tape