Practical cache strategies for ephemeral Dagger CI
A decision guide to persistent engines, host-side cache bridges, registry proxies, and cold execution after Dagger 0.21 removed BuildKit remote export.
Blog
10⁻¹X Engineer stuff.
Hardcoded tool versions in a GitHub Actions step drift from mise.lock under Renovate
Renovate bumps mise.lock but a version pinned inside a workflow run step stays stale, and MISE_LOCKED=1 then aborts. Install tools by name and let the lockfile decide.
TypeScript 7 is fast, but the Compiler API is gone. Here is what that breaks.
The Go rewrite delivers 10x faster type-checking. It also removes the programmatic API that eslint, Dagger, and every framework template type-checker depends on.
Shipping visual regression on React Native: Maestro baselines, an RNTL v14 migration, and killing Storybook
How I closed two testing gaps on a React Native/Expo app, visual regression and CI integration, by adding Maestro baselines, migrating RNTL to v14, and deleting Storybook RN entirely.
Reducing Renovate's blast radius: split groups, custom managers, and the temporal-polyfill lesson
A single broken dependency blocked 20 updates in one Renovate PR. Three config changes prevent it from happening again.
Immutable release bundles and SSM deploys on EC2 without a container orchestrator
Running a production backend on EC2 without Kubernetes: the immutable-release and coherent-backup model I put in to make deploys reversible and restores internally consistent.
GitLab CI auto_cancel can silently drop pipelines after MR rebase
When auto_cancel: on_new_commit is configured, rebasing a merge request from the GitLab web UI can prevent the new pipeline from spawning entirely.
ALTER TYPE ADD VALUE requires the type owner
Adding a value to a PostgreSQL enum requires owning the type itself, and a pg_class ownership-transfer loop won't reassign enums because standalone types live in pg_type.
A Cognito token-pair contract: API Gateway authorizer, Spring, Hono, and PowerSync
How one Cognito user pool serves four client surfaces through a shared token-pair contract, a REQUEST Lambda authorizer, and defense-in-depth re-validation that isolates a new mobile client without duplicating identity.
Self-hosting Renovate on GitLab CI
Running Renovate as a scheduled GitLab CI job instead of the hosted GitHub App: the execution model, the token strategy, config validation in CI, and the tradeoffs accepted at each step.
Designing a GitLab CI cache strategy for a polyglot monorepo on a self-hosted runner
Five cache mechanisms layered on a single self-hosted GitLab runner to keep a Java + Node + Python + React Native monorepo fast without standing up an external cache service.
Collapsing GitLab CI rules instead of the control-plane pattern
GitLab's recommended control-plane include looked like the clean fix for ~40 repeated rules blocks. I evaluated it, found it would break my manual fallbacks and my lint tool, and collapsed the duplicated if-blocks in place instead.
Why pnpm-lock.yaml belongs in .prettierignore
Renovate PRs fail CI when Prettier reformats the lockfile. The fix is one line.
Six ways a full root pnpm workspace broke my polyglot monorepo
Pulling four mature JS apps into one root pnpm workspace with a shared lockfile failed for six concrete reasons; here's the narrower shape that survived.
Scoping a GitLab CI monorepo pipeline by what actually changed
A lockfile change rebuilt five unrelated jobs. The fix was to stop using the lockfile as a build trigger and let the cache key encode toolchain changes instead.