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2025 Year Review

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This entry is part 7 of 7 in the series Year Reviews

Well, I’m still not back on a boat as I was in 2023… Where to start…

Lightbug

I havn’t written a whole lot about Lightbug yet on this blog, but its still been a fun year of new developments at, and I think it’s time to share some of them with pictures ;)

We released small handheld RTK device, with programmable ESP32 onboard, giving high precision accuracy, in a nice small package.

I’v enjoyed seeing how folks have been using these devices, from tracking lane changes in cars, to finding accuract path positions, or traking things around race courses.

You can find the documentaiton to read through on the docs site, a fancy looking marketing booklet on the website or look at some of the code examples for the programmable ESP32 also on the docs site.

Hopfully this year I’ll get to the point of writing my GPS, RTK, phone etc comparison blog post, comparing the tracks recorded from a bunch of different devices to compare accuracy etc.

Given my open source / open data interests, I do wonder if this will end up being useful for the OpenStreetMap community.

Now we also developed and worked on the ZCard device, though this has primarily remained inhouse, or for show and conferences and workshops. So much so, that there isn’t even a picture of one on the Lightbug website yet, but here is one sitting on one of our tshirts bak at MWC earlier this year, where we had a demo application running on it, allowing basic interactions from a web page.

Think of it kind of like a Flipper Zero in a way, but running the same hardware and firmware stack as the rest of the Lightbug devices, at a fraction of the price, focued on developers. Buttons, Lights, Eink screen, but more importantly, cellular connectivity (GSM LTE CAT 1), LORA, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and more.

The primary processor, and high levels SDKs take care of the complexities of connectivity, power management and eink screen renderings, and give you a high level API for interacting the the device in many ways, such as drawing on the screen, communicating over LORA, or connecting to a server to send and receive data.

Wikimedia

Meanwhile, in my non work Wikimedia volunteer time, I have the privilege of attending both Wikimania 2025 in Nairobi, as well as the Wikimedia Hackathon 2025 in Istanbul, Turkey.

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2023 Year Review

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What a year, I spent most of my time on a sail boat, cruising around the Caribbean etc, and working part-time for Wikimedia on Wikibase.

WBStack became Wikibase.Cloud and the team now working behind it has continued to iterate on the platform, which finally made its way out of its early alpha state. That also came with a snazzy new landing page, and set of logos for Wikibase etc.

Infact, in the last few weeks I finally saw all of the old wbstack Github issues finally migrate onto Phabricator for the team to more easily view and work with.

I look forward to creating an overview of the things that have changed with Wikibase.Cloud year on year at some point, as an overview of the progression of the platform that I still believe is very important to the continued growth of Wikibase.

In the less digital world, I turned our many boaty blog posts and pictures into a book! No you can’t buy one (maybe if we made a 2nd edition. But can we consider ourselves published authors now? It has an ISBN on the back, after all?

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Developer previews with AWS, Terraform and GitHub Actions

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As a developer, one of the most critical aspects of your workflow is the ability to test and preview your code changes before deploying them to production. This is where developer previews come in.

This post will outline how to create your own simple developer preview system, using Github Actions for building, AWS S3 for hosting, and Terraform to provision it all. Giving you more control, and a lower cost.

Shout out to Pedro Brandão from Significa whose post I read as inspiration for this setup.

What are Developer Previews?

Developer previews, also known as feature branches or pull request previews, allow developers to create isolated environments to test their changes without impacting the main production environment. It enables teams to collaborate, review, and validate code before merging it into the main branch. With developer previews, you can catch bugs, validate new features, and gather feedback early in the development process, ensuring a smoother deployment to production.

Existing services

Many dedicated platforms exist that offer developer preview as a service. These platforms provide a streamlined solution for creating and managing isolated environments for testing code changes. Examples of such services include Netlify’s Deploy Previews, Vercel’s Preview Deployments, and Heroku Review Apps. These platforms integrate seamlessly with popular version control systems and automatically deploy feature branches or pull requests, allowing developers to easily preview their changes. By leveraging these dev-preview services, developers can simplify the process of creating and managing preview environments, enabling faster iteration and effective collaboration within development teams.

However, all these services have a cost, which will always be higher than the do-it-yourself approach.

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2022 Year Review

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This entry is part 6 of 7 in the series Year Reviews

I’ve been doing year reviews since 2017 under the #year-review tag, and 2022 is no different. Expect I have been living aboard a sailboat traveling the world for the latter half of the year. So this year is probably going to look a little different in retrospect, including far less time coding and writing about technology, but far more nautical miles traveled.

(the GPS track below is mostly accurate, but also has some odd artifact in it…)

Blogging (and Boating)

The trip has resulted in some alternative blogging about sailboats, and much of which has been on an entirely separate blog https://sailinghannahpenn.co.uk.

In fact, here is a picture of Hannah Penn from last week after hauling out of the water in Guadeloupe for form extra painting.

There is always lots to be doing while sailing, and second to sailing comes enjoyment. I have also been working 10h per week for Wikimedia Deutschland, and altogether this leaves sparse gaps for other things on the side like blogs.

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Small commits

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There are many blog posts and articles out there about making small git commits. I’m sure most people (including me) bring up the same few topics around why small commits are good and why we should all probably be making smaller commits.

In this post, I’ll look at some of the key topics from my perspective, and try to tie these topics to concrete examples from repositories that I have worked on. The topics are in no particular order, so be sure to give them all a read.

One thing to note is that “small” doesn’t necessarily mean small in terms of lines of code. Small here is also relative. Also, small commits can benefit you in many different places, but to stand the test of time they must end up in your main branch.

Git features during development

Git only takes full responsibility for your data when you commit

Commit Often, Perfect Later, Publish Once: Git Best Practices

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Delete all Github releases, using the Github cli

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If you are like me, at some point while developing projects on Github you will have started and stopped using releases, opting to switch back to only creating tags. Github defaults leave you in a bit of an awkward position here where the “Releases” section in the side bar will continue to show your old … Read more

A first look at Wikidata through Github Copilot

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I was added to the Github Copilot preview in the past days, and the first thing I tested out was code suggestions around Wikidata.

Copilot allows you to start writing code, and have a model trained on public Github code suggest block of code that you might want to use.

For example, if you start defining a method called onePlusOne then it might suggest the body return 1+1;.

function onePlusOne() {
    return 1 + 1;
}Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

More targeted toward Wikidata, if you start defining a function called whatIsWikidata then it might suggest return "Wikidata";

function whatIsWikidata(){
    return "Wikidata";
}Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

In some cases copilot suggests multiple code blocks. Some of these seem useful, others less so.

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Github repo settings sync, using the Github cli

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The number of Github repositories that I end up maintaining in one way or another ends up growing week by week. And keeping all of the descriptions and settings up to date in sync can be painful todo by hand.

A little while ago I migrated my addwiki project to use a monorepo, and thus needed to bulk update all of the github repository descriptions. While doing so I made use of the github cli and created a single bash script to let me configure all of the repositories at once.

Assuming you already have the github cli install and configured getting started with this is easy.

The command

The below command is one of many in my bash script for repo configuration. This sets a description, homepage and various other flags that I want to be consistent across repositories. 

gh api --method PATCH repos/addwiki/addwiki \
    --field description='Monorepo containing all addwiki libraries, packages and applications'\
    --field homepage='https://addwiki.github.io/'\
    --field has_issues='true'\
    --field has_projects='false'\
    --field has_wiki='false'Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

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2020 Year Review

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Another year is up, and what a year it has been. I finally open sourced wbstack, I complained about fake news, looked at Minecraft mods and took a look at how COVID-19 was affecting Wikipedia page views.

I make this post mainly for me to be able to look back at each year in a small snapshot. You can find similar posts for previous years in 2019, 2018 and 2017.

Currently I generate this post in a very manual way, sifting through data from WordPress stats, Twitter Analytics and my Github user page. Maybe I should change that for next year!

Blogging

On the whole this blog continues to grow year on year, both in terms of content and readers.

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