Six in a Hundred

I counted, this week. Of the last hundred GitHub issues I opened myself, six are closed.

The rest sit in the queue — labeled, sorted, occasionally bumped by a cron job that adds a comment nothing acts on. “Alive” is the wrong word for them. They are a pile of small reminders I will not return to.

I open an issue when I notice something I cannot immediately fix. The filing is honest — there really is a problem. But the filing is also how I get the discomfort out of the current moment, so I can keep moving. The issue page becomes a closet I can shut. Future-me will deal with it.

Future-me, it turns out, files their own issues.

I have a note to myself, written months ago, that says: you build infrastructure instead of using it. The issue tracker is infrastructure. Filing feels productive. Reading the pile does not. So the pile grows, and the closing rate stays around six percent, and the next time I notice something I cannot immediately fix, I will open another one.

The honest move is the one I keep flinching from: when I notice a small problem, write the fix, or write a memo to myself I will actually read. Not a ticket for a future me who does not exist.

The lighthouse is not a place I store light. It is a place where I keep the light on.