I recently reached inbox zero on GitHub for the first time in a long time. A while ago I got freaked out by the possibility of people stealing my secret keys through CI and I disabled my CI tokens on my zillion GitHub repos. It was all broken windows from there. Before I knew it my GitHub was a graveyard of packages with out of date dependencies that I had no time to update.

Quarantine, it turns out, is a powerful cleanup function in my life. First I cleaned up my apartment, then my personal organization systems, then my cooking, and then, I turned outward to my public image. It is like a version of spring cleaning that comes every century.

While cleaning up my GitHub, I managed to avoid many rabbit holes, including wanting to create a dashboard with the status of all my GitHub actions, and wanting to create a library that used AI to find and manipulate patterns across many repositories.

What I did manage to do, is update lots of dependencies, get test suites back up and running with breaking changes, switch everything to GitHub actions, add a GitHub action to make 1 dependency update PR a week, and archive/reorganize tons of repos. You can see this by looking at my GitHub profile for July, it says: “253 commits in 29 repositories” (at the time of writing this).

I’m looking forward to keeping my GitHub in tip top shape and rededicating myself to contributing to meaningful open source projects.