Spent most of Saturday doing something that sounds trivial and absolutely was not trivial: renaming master to main across every git repo I still have lying around. GitHub said this week it's going to make main the default for new repos later this year, and a bunch of projects (Python core among them) had already started moving that direction, so I figured I'd just get ahead of it on my own stuff instead of doing it piecemeal later while half-annoyed.
Nine repos. Some of them are ancient — I found one from 2013 that still had a bower.json in it, which, if you don't remember what Bower is, consider yourself lucky. Renaming the branch itself takes ten seconds: git branch -m master main, push, done. The part nobody warns you about is everything downstream of that branch name that you forgot was hardcoded somewhere. My Netlify build for one site was pointed explicitly at master in the dashboard settings, not inferred from the repo, and I didn't notice until the site quietly stopped deploying and I got a build-failed email at 11:40pm while half asleep. Fixed it in two minutes once I actually looked, but that's a very specific kind of dumb way to lose twenty minutes of a Saturday night.
I want to be honest about my actual opinion here, because I think a lot of the writing about this move online this month has been either weirdly defensive or weirdly triumphant, and neither one matches how it actually felt to do it. Renaming a branch is fine. It costs me nothing. "Main" is arguably a better word anyway, shorter, doesn't imply a hierarchy that was never really the point of the term in a version control context to begin with. But I'm skeptical of treating it as some kind of accomplishment on its own, the way I've seen a few companies frame it this week like it's the headline action item. It's a low-effort, zero-risk change that costs a company nothing and changes nothing structural about who gets hired, promoted, or paid what. Do it, sure. Just don't confuse doing it with having done something hard.
Separately, and much smaller as news goes: Zoom said today it's walking back the thing it said a couple weeks ago about end-to-end encryption only being available to paying customers. Free accounts are getting it too now. I use Zoom for exactly one thing, a standing call with my parents on Sundays, and I never once thought about the encryption tier, but I'm glad they reversed it rather than dug in. The original plan (paid E2E, free users get regular TLS) was one of those decisions that makes total sense from a "how do we handle law enforcement requests on free accounts" spreadsheet and terrible sense from a "why would a security feature be a paywall" human standpoint. Good on whoever inside that company pushed back hard enough to get it changed in under three weeks.
Also, unrelated tangent, but I finally caved and bought a real monitor arm instead of stacking a monitor on top of a shoebox full of old cables, which is the setup I've had since March. $89 off Amazon, clamps to the desk, and my neck already feels less like a question mark by end of day. Should've done this in week one of working from home. I kept telling myself the shoebox setup was "temporary."
Anyway. Nine repos renamed, one deploy config fixed, one shoebox retired. Going to go stare at the monitor arm some more, I think I'm unreasonably pleased with it.