Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

New blog theme

Despite telling myself I would only update my website theme once a year, tonight I decided to throw that rule out the window and give it a new look.

Blog post by Matthew Lang titled "Moving on from GitHub" dated May 2, 2026, discussing GitHub outages and migrations to alternatives.

Gone are the hand-drawn-style dividers and the Kagi-inspired black, white, and gold theme, to be replaced by a Rosepine theme featuring earthy tones. Very apt now that we are coming into summer here in the UK.

I have made a bit more use of a card design for the website’s images, blogroll and reading pages.

For fonts, I am using Lora for body text and Fraunces for headings. I quite like to split my font selection this way.

To make future changes to the colour scheme, I have set up five CSS variables that represent the theme’s main colours. Any other colours are derived from these five variables using the color-mix function.

I definitely scratched an itch with this one, as I felt the previous theme was too stark and lacked some warmth. I’ve found it in this colour selection and by changing the fonts the website uses.

I had hoped to try out Claude Design with a couple of Rails applications this morning. Disappointing start so far.

You can only link code from a GitHub profile, which I don’t use, or using a local folder through the browser, but you need Chrome or Edge to do that.

Guess I’ll need to wait a while.

A busy day in the Lang household today

Our oldest, Ethan, returns home for the summer after his first year at McKendree University in Illinois. Just getting his breakfast order ready now for him walking through the door.

He was home at Christmas for a few weeks, but with the whole summer ahead of us, it will be good to get a proper catch-up with him and get a few rounds of golf together.

Later today, our youngest, Drew, is playing in a Stephen Gallagher Foundation event up at Paisley Golf Club. The first individual competition of the season for him, and with a new set of irons in the bag, I’m sure he’s going to have quite a few good rounds of golf ahead of him over the summer.

Once that’s done, it will be back home for a family dinner for four. Our first time together sitting down to a meal since Christmas.

Looking forward to a summer of family, bbqs, golf and good times.

One of the newest things that many notes apps are doing with Markdown is callouts. They add context to your notes. I first came across these in Bear, but good to see that Obsidian also supports callouts.

I might have jumped the gun putting my tomato plants out in the greenhouse last week. Colder temperatures at night this week, but hopefully they’re sheltered enough in there to keep the worst of the cold away.

Slightly overwhelmed by the number of admin libraries available for Ruby on Rails. Avo and Active Scaffold appear to be the most recently updated libraries in this category on Ruby Toolbox, which is great from a support perspective. Worth rolling my own, though?

Moving on from GitHub

It’s been quite a week for GitHub and not in a good way.

It’s no secret that GitHub outages have been more frequent recently. The Missing GitHub Status Page definitely paints a more accurate picture of the outages that GitHub have been experiencing.

This week, Kev Quirk shared his reasons for migrating his public repositories away from GitHub to Codeberg. While he acknowledged the significant downtime, Kev’s main reason for leaving GitHub is to reduce reliance on big tech.

Recently, Mitchell Hashimoto, author of Ghostty, also indicated that the Ghostty project will be moving away from GitHub. Mitchell cited the increasing outages of GitHub as being the main driver behind the project moving elsewhere.

My move away from GitHub stemmed from a sense of division between work and personal life. I use GitHub for work and for personal projects. Despite using separate laptops for work and personal, I actually have the same GitHub account for both. So while I changed my laptop, the GitHub account was still the same. GitHub was convenient, and that convenience blurred the line between work and personal. Eventually, I found myself tuning out more on my personal projects as I felt I was still in my work environment in GitHub. It was time to consider another place for my personal projects.

GitHub’s centralisation made it hard to consider leaving. Everything is already there. All the popular open source projects, lots of social features and thousands of developers that you can follow. I imagine it’s the Facebook for developers (even though I don’t have a Facebook account).

I started looking for an alternative platform to host my projects on and eventually settled on Sourcehut.

Yes, it lacks several features that are perhaps taken for granted in other platforms like GitLab and GitHub, but it was this minimalism that attracted me to the platform. It just had the essentials that I needed. Git hosting for my projects and the ability to track tickets for those projects. I can still manage my personal projects with ease, perhaps even easier now that I do everything through the terminal.

As for the social side of GitHub, I don’t feel I have missed out on anything by moving to SourceHut. I’m still keeping up to date with new open source projects and libraries through the different RSS feeds and newsletters I subscribe to. As for people, I subscribe to their blogs. If it’s important, they’ll write about it.

GitHub’s recent outages have sparked several conversations on websites like Hacker News and Lobsters. It would be easy to identify outages as the main reason people are moving away from GitHub, but clearly, it’s rarely the whole story.