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Weekly release notes for my side projects, written by a bot every Sunday from the week's commits and pull requests.

2026-W42

2026-W42 (Oct 11 to Oct 17, 2026)

4 active days | 3 repos | 28 PRs merged | 7 commits

Week in a sentence: Login moved from Static Web Apps onto the API with a production cutover, and the rest of the week went to deploy safety, cost, timeline polish, and a new weekly release-notes page.

brandonchastain/brandonchastain.com

Added a weekly Release Notes page at /release-notes/. A Sunday-evening bot collects the week's commits, merged PRs, and releases across repos, summarizes them with Claude Haiku (with a plain-list fallback), and publishes the result to the site. The first week (2026-W42) is seeded from a real run, and the home page links to it.
The bot now skips a repo its token can't read and logs it, failing only if every repo is unreadable.
Still to do: add the workflow secrets on this repo before the schedule runs unattended.

brandonchastain/rss-reader

Login now goes through the API. The site cut over to API login with Microsoft on 2026-10-17, with Google and GitHub providers built behind it. Admin access and Microsoft account linking were fixed along the way, and the provider account picker always appears.
Deploys no longer risk losing recent writes. The database is handed over between revisions, which ends the risk of losing up to 15 minutes of user writes on each deploy.
Cost and cold starts: the API keeps one replica warm, and idle backup, scheduler, and probe work was cut to bring the bill back down from about $45/month.
Timeline: read posts stay visible until the next fetch, the misleading "new posts" toast no longer appears on search or per-feed pages, and manual refresh fetches every stale feed. The list no longer shifts while you read, and the cached timeline reconciles with the server on open.
The API has its own hostname, api.rss.brandonchastain.com, and self-hosting docs were added. Production was deployed 20 times.

brandonchastain/shipped-log

New repo for the weekly shipped summary: a .NET console app that gathers commits, merged PRs, releases, and deployments from personal repos, filters out noise, and writes a weekly markdown summary with an index.
Sends a notification via ntfy, using the same topic and optional token setup as the cost watchdog.
A setup.ps1 script stores the workflow secrets with gh so they never end up in the repo.

Raw activity

brandonchastain/brandonchastain.com

PR #2 Release notes bot: skip unreadable repos
PR #1 Add weekly Release Notes page (/release-notes/)
ce14e37 Add the weekly shipped log: bot in tools/shipped-log, page at /shipped/
6976373 Shipped log: keep the fallback summary short, raw list only in the collapsible block
eff915d Rename the page to Release Notes at /release-notes/
ebe5c62 Rename the workflow files to release-notes*.yml
d6ef435 Release notes bot: skip a repo the token cannot read instead of crashing

brandonchastain/rss-reader

PR #145 fix(feed): never show the "new posts" toast on the per-feed page
PR #144 fix(unread): keep read posts visible until the next server fetch
PR #143 fix(search): never show the "new posts" toast on the search page
PR #142 feat: manual refresh fetches every stale feed; deflake the handover tests
PR #140 test: rename the test project to RssReaderTests
PR #139 fix(durability): hand the DB over between revisions on deploy (#136)
PR #137 fix(auth): always show the provider's account picker
PR #127 docs: self-hosting, architecture and deploy pages for API login
PR #135 cutover: the site logs in through the API
PR #132 docs: explain ghcr.io 'denied' from a stale scopeless credential
PR #133 feat(auth): link pre-migration rows by a hash of the Microsoft-reported email
PR #131 diag(auth): log the claim types of an SWA principal that carries no object id
PR #129 fix: dev auth flag and admin check across the login migration
PR #130 skills: launch Docker Desktop through the shell in run-locally
PR #126 infra: login provider secrets, session keys and the cutover switch
PR #125 feat(frontend): log in through the API instead of Static Web Apps Easy Auth
PR #128 perf: cut the warm replica's idle-time work (backup, scheduler, probes)
PR #121 docs: label the hardcoded knob tables as such
PR #124 fix: bind the API hostname with an explicit managed certificate
PR #122 infra: give the API its own hostname, api.rss.brandonchastain.com
PR #123 feat(api): cookie login with Google, Microsoft and GitHub behind /auth/*
PR #120 docs: knobs catalogue, self-hosting guide, and one consistent durability story
PR #119 fix: reconcile the cached timeline with the server on every open
PR #118 perf: keep one replica warm and take image restore, FTS count and quick_check off the cold-start path
PR #117 fix: replace Virtualize with a measured window so the timeline never shifts under the reader
PR #116 fix: hold the reader's row still while the virtualized timeline re-windows
Deployed to production (20x)

brandonchastain/shipped-log

7892a05 Weekly shipped summary: .NET console app, Actions workflow, tests
4e4f925 Match the cost watchdog ntfy setup: topic + optional token, add setup.ps1