CI Gates, Test Result Caches, and the Code Graph That Might Tell Us What to Test
What I learned from splitting Rails CI by risk, caching exact test results, and exploring whether AI and code graphs can make test selection safer.
Tag: ci
When a Green Deployment Still Serves a 500
A REX production incident exposed the gap between a successful Kubernetes rollout and a working application, and what we changed to close it.
The CI failures that moved every time you reran them
How a moving set of Rails CI flakes exposed shared download state, Selenium stale-node retries, and specs asserting before the browser settled.
Deterministic Rails CI failures: read the evidence first
A Rails CI debugging story: following the evidence to shared test state, instead of weakening assertions to make failures disappear.
Migrating a Rails App from Yarn + Webpacker to pnpm + Vite
A migration path from Webpacker and Yarn to pnpm and Vite in a Rails app, including the dependency, Docker, and asset-hash pitfalls we hit along the way.
Signed React Native Android APKs from GitHub Actions
A GitHub Actions pipeline that decodes a base64 keystore from repository secrets and produces a signed React Native Android APK on every push.
Optimizing Android Builds in GitHub Actions
Android builds in GitHub Actions run 10-30 minutes unoptimized; layered Gradle and Yarn caching plus scoped environment secrets get that down to a few minutes.
When to Mock and When to Hit the Real Thing in Rails Tests
A practical breakdown of when to mock external dependencies in Rails tests versus using the real thing, built around the test pyramid, VCR, WebMock, and Pact.
Timezone Bugs in Ruby: BST vs UTC in CI and Cron
How British Summer Time breaks Ruby tests, cron schedules, and cloud functions that assume UTC, and how to write timezone-aware specs instead.
Code Review Anti-Patterns That Waste the Most Time
The code review anti-patterns that slow teams down most: giant PRs, style-war comments, and reviews that skip the business context entirely.
Build and Push Docker Images to Quay.io with GitHub Actions
A working GitHub Actions workflow that builds a Docker image and pushes it to Quay.io using a scoped robot account and repository secrets.
Why npm ci Runs prepare Scripts for Git Dependencies
npm ci is not the script-free install it looks like; it still runs prepare scripts for Git-based dependencies, which broke Husky in CI.
Poetry vs uv: Choosing a Python Dependency Manager
Poetry and uv solve overlapping problems in Python dependency management; here is where each one wins, and how to use them together.
Catching Database Configuration Drift Between Microservices
Two services sharing a database can pass every test and still fail in production if their DB configuration silently drifts apart.
Kaniko: building container images without a Docker daemon
Kaniko builds and pushes container images without a Docker daemon, and the setup for it differs across GitHub Actions, Google Cloud Build, and CircleCI.
Retry mechanisms for flaky CI and Docker builds
Wrapping curl, bundle install, and Docker builds in retry logic turns transient network failures in CI into automatic retries instead of full pipeline restarts.
Docker Buildx --on-error: drop into a shell when a build fails
The --on-error flag in Docker Buildx drops you into a shell inside the failing build step so you can inspect state instead of guessing from logs.
How to Debug Docker Image Builds
Practical techniques for debugging Docker image builds: BuildKit output flags, inspecting intermediate layers, nsenter tricks, and multi-stage build targets.
Building and Deploying pgpool Images with GitHub Actions
A GitHub Actions workflow that builds multi-architecture pgpool images for several versions in parallel and pushes them to GitHub Container Registry.
GitHub Actions Variables: env, Contexts, Secrets, and Matrix
How GitHub Actions variables work in practice: env blocks, context variables, secrets, matrix strategies, and passing step outputs between steps.