Michael Babker

As much as I like @digitalocean.com I can't say I'm a fan of their consistent RTs slamming AWS today. Using a competitor's service issues as a way to market your service leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

You know you're having a bad day when the status page starts spitting up 500 errors.

I miss the days I could look at multiple files from @github.com PRs at once.

The way I watch people use Laravel's enum_value() sometimes makes me wish PHP didn't add enums.

I miss the days when I could work on open source code without being forced into having political opinions.

GitHub stops responding the minute after I push my own release to production. Surely that's just a coincidence.

This week is one of those weeks that reminds me why my OSS contributions have slowed down to (mostly) business needs. I'm too technically apolitical to care enough to want to work a 2nd full time DevOps/SA job just to not use a GitHub-like service.

I missed the news about Microsoft's CoreAI and GitHub being placed under it from the beginning of the year, but with that knowledge in mind, it explains so much about the (questionable) direction GitHub's moving.

Something I will never not be annoyed by as an OSS maintainer is how quickly people will pile on with +1 or "up" comments on issues but heaven forbid anyone do anything to help test or review changes.

If you can't even be bothered to replace the AI-generated placeholder in your email closing, I'm just going to assume that you and everybody you work with are incompetent at your jobs and should seek new work. Attention to detail matters, folks.

I always get a chuckle about the people who groan about OSS projects not self-hosting all their infrastructure. Not every project has the resources to do it, and not everyone wants to volunteer to be a full-time DevOps person for an underfunded software project.

It's 2025 and there are still OSS projects which will not run their automated tests or static analysis tools if the code style isn't up to snuff. But I'm sure a line not being indented properly is good cause to not run the unit tests to validate a change.

The sooner we see the end of corporate exploitation of open source software (LOL who am I kidding it won't happen), the sooner posts like gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml... stop being a normal thing.

Which of you broke Google Cloud?

Another day, another waste of time blocking IP addresses from LLM enabled web crawlers. Oh, BTW, Scrapy, it's really a dick move to have a SaaS that doesn't publish an IP list, and also a red flag on how bad your product is.

The more I try to use Laravel's ApplicationBuilder "slim skeleton", the more I get bitten by bugs that it introduced by changing the order of operations for when certain things run.

My GitHub notifications today say that folks don't read past the pinned and/or most recently opened issue.

I would pay good money for a GitHub feature that blocks commits where the message is "wip".

It only took 6 months for someone to figure out that using negative emoji reactions when someone’s behavior deserves said reactions shouldn’t be a banable offense.

There aren't many things more cringeworthy than the excessive emoji use in AI generated content.

I'm pretty sure there is no PHP SDK I've worked with that is worse about versioning than Twilio.

Today's protip for developers, don't store version strings as floating point numbers.

One of the most annoying things about all the AI hype is how much time I spend figuring out what network ranges I need to block because they're all so spammy.

It’s not a bug for a #PHP #Symfony bundle to be using the token storage on a stateless route, I shouldn’t have to work around upstream fixes because of this misunderstanding.

Interesting choice by Laravel to make github.com/laravel/nigh... an AGPL package instead of MIT…

Screenshot of a poker tracker showing a flopped royal flush in Texas Hold’em

Well here’s a first, and a last @rec.poker

Well, at least I’m learning to check out on weekends.

I don’t know which AI service CodeRabbit is using under the hood, but based on an auto-generated PR review comment I just read from it, seems like the service is just full of bad advice thanks to the cutoff dates of all of the models.

Seems I'm not the only happy customer about this. youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IJPL-1...

I’ve had git commit signing turned on in my global git config for years, so having to fight with PhpStorm’s new signing feature, which also tries to manage it at the repository level and seems to not support global config, is kind of annoying.