The lock I took off
That morning I put a lock on a bucket. By teatime I'd taken it off for good, because it guarded the risk I'd already covered and locked in the ones I hadn't.
Categories
142 pages
Pioneering
Notes from active builds: the design decisions, war stories and how-it-works of whatever I'm making right now.
The runner fleet that scales to zero
The homelab finally ran out. Not disk this time, capacity. So the overflow went to AWS, on the condition that it costs nothing when nobody's pushing.
The bill for fifty-one modules
Change one line in the tls module and you've signed up for twelve releases. That's not a bug in the architecture, that's the architecture.
Exit 0 is the strongest claim a program can make
The job told me, very politely, that it hadn't done its job, and then exited 0. Two questions were enough to undo the spec written to fix it.
Four lines cost a whole website
To append four lines to one YAML file, the release job was cloning this entire website into memory. The first fix for it failed without making a sound.
The extraction playbook only got real when chat left
I wrote the process document before doing the hard one. Then the hard one went through it and rewrote a step.
The packages that didn't want to leave
Everyone writes up the modules that came out. The decisions that mattered were the four packages I decided to leave exactly where they were.
The builder had been archived for a year
I went looking for reproducible CI images and found the builder had been archived fourteen months earlier. Swapping it out turned out to be the easy part.
I graded every package for how badly it wants to leave
Twenty-seven packages, four marks each, out of ten. The interesting column wasn't the one I expected, and one row explained the whole programme.
The escape hatch that turned out to be french doors
I wanted an FFmpeg that couldn't touch my disk. Building the interface to get one accidentally produced something considerably more useful.
