Systems Architecture
Recently, I’ve gotten to wrap my head around versioning again. If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you might remember that I wrote a post about API versioning in mid-2021. Back then, I focused on versioning API-first developer products. This problem was relatively contained, we used
Electron
Last week, I wrote about releasing Electron applications on macOS, going into detail on the specific steps required to go from source code to packaged application. Building your app on your development machine is one thing, but ideally, you want to publish new builds as soon as a commit is
Automation
Two weeks ago, I wrote about enforcing required status checks in GitHub actions. This was required in scenarios with sharding or running tests in parallel. Today, I wanted to extend this to setups with multiple services, which create a different dynamic: When files in a service change, you want to
Automation
A very important GitHub feature for teams is to configure branch protections. These typically include requiring pull requests and a minimum number of reviews, preventing force pushes to main branches, signing commits, and most importantly, passing status checks. Status checks can be added by external services to commits to signal
Automation
Building and pushing Docker images is one of the most common tasks in the deployment pipeline of most engineering teams. We usually want to build the images ahead of time to create a repository of images we can use for our deployments, or are required to do so in case
Automation
About five months ago, Notion launched their long-awaited public API. The team initially delivered basic features and continuously improved the surface with more functionality and block types to support a growing number of use cases. I use Notion for, drum roll, note-taking. I create a page every day to take
Github Actions
GitHub Actions is becoming one of the major CI providers, benefitting hugely from the tight integration to GitHub's other features. In this post, I'll walk through a feature that is seemingly inconspicuous but can become quite powerful if used right: Job strategies, and more precisely, the
Systems Architecture
The faster you can release changes, the faster you can ship new features, fix bugs, and solve incidents. But there's more: The less time it takes to think about deploying to production, the more time your engineers get back to work on meaningful tasks or spend their time
Observability
In my recent posts on managing a commit-oriented infrastructure, I explained the benefits of deploying services of one specific version. This version would be the hashed Git commit reference, or commit SHA. When running this kind of setup, you might encounter the question of which version is running at the
CI/CD
We spend a huge time thinking about building our products, but less about the pipeline that delivers features from engineering to production. Ideally, we want to test the latest changes before they're released to all our users, even if we carefully hide them behind feature toggles. We also
Containers
As products grow, so does the requirement to ship more often, which is desirable as it enables continuous feature delivery in a low-friction scenario. Getting to the point where you can release changes multiples times a day, often even an hour, all without having to worry about breaking production requires
CI/CD
Cypress has become one of the most popular tools for running reliable browser-based tests across multiple environments, making sure that your web application will behave as expected in production. This surge in user adoption and popularity over the past years is hugely based on high-quality developer documentation, a straightforward API
Open-Source
A few days ago, I published my introductory post on a freshly-released tool called compose-deploy, which can be used to deploy your Docker Compose application to a group of deployment targets using nothing more than ssh and built-in Docker (and Docker Compose) features. Since then, I have tried to think
Open-Source
When developing dockerized applications, you might stumble upon the sheer difficulty and annoyance of simply deploying your Compose file along with built service images. If you're not using a full cloud setup and instead want to deploy to a small number of machines, you're left with