GitHub Graph API sucks

I tried to use GitHub’s Graph API for a new project: Github Project Recap, a Slack application that sends a daily recap (usually in the morning) of the GitHub project cards that haven’t been closed yet, so you can have a quick summary before the standup and see at a glance if someone has too much or too little work.

Therefore, GitHub’s Graph API can be confusing and challenging to navigate. There are numerous entities/models, and it’s not clear how to get to the model that we’re interested in.

After several days of research, I finally figured out how to get the name of the column where the card is located!

fieldValueByName(name: "Status") {
	... on ProjectV2ItemFieldSingleSelectValue {
		name
	}
}

GraphQL aliases

Speaking of GraphQL, while working with the (unwieldy) GitHub APIs, I came across aliases in GraphQL, so you can request a field and give it an alias, or request the same field multiple times with different aliases, which seems to be very useful if you need multiple fieldValueByName fields:

column: fieldValueByName(name: "Status") {
	... on ProjectV2ItemFieldSingleSelectValue {
		name
	}
}
size: fieldValueByName(name: "Size") {
	... on ProjectV2ItemFieldSingleSelectValue {
		name
	}
}

Without the aliases the previous query does not work.

Ruby on Rails daemon quirks

When running Ruby on Rails with the d command (i.e., as a daemon), the reference to the project folder is lost. As a result, running Dir.pwd or pwd will simply return /. Although it makes sense, it took me hours to figure out the problem!

Linux commands

The command lsof -i :3000 -t directly returns the process ID to kill, making it very convenient to use with kill -9 $(lsof -i :3000 -t). So I turned it into a function and added it to my .bashrc file.

killp () { kill -9 $(lsof -i :$1 -t) }