I’ve been going through a pile of old bitquabit posts. While many of them hold up over time, the more technical ones frequently don’t: even when I was lucky and happened to get every technical detail right, and every technical recommendation I threw out held up over time (hint: this basically never happens), they were written for a time that, usually, has passed. Best practices for Mercurial in 2008 are very much not best practices now. But it’s a bit tricky: whether something I wrote is genuinely out-of-date has less to do with how much raw time has passed, than how much churn in the project has happened.

To that end, I was happy to see that some of the blogs I follow have started using Git commit SHAs to date their post, alongside the calendrical date—serving as a kind of vector clock for the passionate. If you’re writing technical posts for an open-source project, this seems ideal to me: for casual observers, they can go with the calendrical date, and for people deeply involved in that arena or project, they can instead key off what has happened since the commit in question.

I’m not going to retrofit all my old posts, but it’s something I’ll keep in mind going forward.