The build gate these sites never had
Three Hugo sites each hand-rolled a near-identical deploy job that only ever ran on merge, so nothing ever checked the build before it landed.
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20 pages
GitLab
The secret that wasn't on my branch
A secret scanner failed a merge request over a test key and a documentation PEM that the change did not contain. Scoping a scan properly.
Sign your own binaries with go-tool-base, part 3: keyless CI signing with OIDC
Let CI sign with a KMS key without storing any AWS credentials, using OIDC federation. Covers both the GitLab and the GitHub path.
From allow_failure to blocking
Turning three advisory CI jobs into real gates once they were trustworthy enough to block a merge, and how to tell when they are.
Moving this blog off Jekyll
Moving this blog from Jekyll and GitHub Pages to Hugo and GitLab Pages, and the two things I would do differently next time.
Two bugs that taught me the rules
Two CI and infrastructure bugs with one shape: a GitLab job with no rules block skips merge requests, and an import block runs only once.
Reviewed, then applied
Closing the plan-versus-apply gap in infrastructure CI by applying the saved plan artifact rather than quietly re-planning at apply time.
CI you include, not copy
Copied .gitlab-ci.yml files drift out of sync. How GitLab CI/CD Components let a repo include and version-pin a shared pipeline instead.
A 403 you can't fix in IAM
A GitLab to AWS OIDC trust policy kept returning 403, and no IAM change fixed it: the policy matched a claim GitLab never actually asserts.
Why go-tool-base left GitHub for GitLab
An accidental major version bump was the last straw after months of unreliability. Why a Go framework moved off GitHub, and what moved with it.
