Kyle Roth

GPG is cool. You can use GPG to send encrypted messages, sign files to prove you generated them, and sign git commits to prove you committed them. You can get my key here. DigitalOcean has a neat guide to getting started with GPG. It explains asymmetric encryption, key generation and revocation, and key signing and maintenance. Git commit authorship can be modified by anyone, as demonstrated by this tool. But by uploading your GPG public key to GitHub, you allow anyone who trusts GitHub to be sure that commits marked “verified” were actually created by you.

Here’s some of my favorite art. Ben Shahn, All That Is Beautiful, 1966 (source) Peter Doig, Architect’s Home in the Ravine, 1991 (source) Jorge Cocco Santángelo, The Call, 2015 (source)

I recently had to remove a keyword from the git history of a project I was working on. This meant not just removing a file but modifying commits where the keyword was added, commits where the keyword was removed, and even commits with the keyword in the commit message. I eventually came to the right solution through a mix of blog posts and the documentation for git rebase. For this example, assume the keyword is “matrix”.

Matrix is a federated, open source chat system. By federated, we mean that people can communicate across different servers, like in the image on the right. In that way, it works sort of like email: even though you may use you@gmail.com and I might use me@kylrth.com, we can still write each other emails. In our case, I host the server at matrix.kylrth.com, and you and I can connect to it with various clients.