Github actions are a great tool to setup automatic build and tests. I also use it for any of my automatic releases. See this post. Until now there was one thing missing. If someone would fork the repository, all builds would fail because of missing secrets needed for the release.

Yesterday I released my first github action, it allows you to check if certain secrets are set, and then decide to continue yourself. Or skip specific steps, this functionallity seemed to be missing from the actions marketplace. So now yoou can check the existens of certain secrets (or other inputs), and decide to either have the actioon run fail or just continue and skip some steps.

Github exposes all their data at a GraphQL endpoint, that you can also try out with the Github GraphQL explorer.

If you want to query who is sponsoring you, use the following GraphQL. You can use this query at the explorer of in your own graphql client.

In January 2017 I released a plugin for Wordpress called WP REST API - filter fields it had a somewhat limited reach (2000+ active installs according to the stats), but people where using it. It was a plugin on the wordpress rest api (which was also a plugin at that time), it allowed the user to tell the server which fields from the api they wanted back. Because I wasn’t changing the api, I was only filtering the output (after everything was retrieved from the database), this didn’t make it much faster, but the resulting data to transfer was smaller (which was a big thing 4 years ago).

Today I switched to personal website for my new personal page on Github. It’s a pretty nice template to generate a static page with the use of Jekyll, at build time it loads some details from github (like my repositories). This means that the page will only show the data of the last time it was build.