CI pipelines that finish before the coffee does

#ci-cd#tooling

Caching, matrix builds, and the discipline of a pipeline under four minutes.

I want to be honest about the trade-offs here. The approach I settled on solves the problem I had, not every problem of this shape, and there is a clear point where you should reach for something more heavy-duty.

Where I started

Tools matter less than the feedback loop they enable. A fast, boring loop beat every sophisticated setup I tried, and I've kept it ever since, even as the rest of the stack changed twice over.

What surprised me most was how small the final change was. Most of the work was understanding the problem precisely enough that the fix became obvious, and that understanding took far longer than the fix itself.

[deploy]
strategy = "rolling"
healthcheck = "/healthz"
max_unavailable = 1

What went wrong

What surprised me most was how small the final change was. Most of the work was understanding the problem precisely enough that the fix became obvious, and that understanding took far longer than the fix itself.

The first version worked, which is exactly why it was hard to see how wrong it was. Everything looked fine in the demo, and everything looked fine until traffic arrived on a Tuesday afternoon and the graph started doing something I'd never seen before.

A risky operation or a likely mistake.

The fix

What surprised me most was how small the final change was. Most of the work was understanding the problem precisely enough that the fix became obvious, and that understanding took far longer than the fix itself.

I kept a log of every decision during this project, and reading it back a month later was humbling: the choices that aged well were the boring ones, and the clever ones all came with a footnote I hadn't written yet.

  • Read the error message twice before changing anything
  • Reproduce it with the smallest input you can
  • Write the failing test first, even if it feels ceremonial
  • Only then reach for the fix

What I'd do differently

The numbers below are from my own machine and my own workload. Treat them as a method, not a benchmark: the point is how the measurement was taken, not the exact figures it produced.

I want to be honest about the trade-offs here. The approach I settled on solves the problem I had, not every problem of this shape, and there is a clear point where you should reach for something more heavy-duty.

The numbers below are from my own machine and my own workload. Treat them as a method, not a benchmark: the point is how the measurement was taken, not the exact figures it produced.