Writing
Notes on engineering practice — systems, operations, the work of leading teams that ship.
Last month I killed cloud CI and rebuilt the pipeline as local scripts. It worked, but it was a second copy of my pipeline I had to keep faithful by hand. The better idea: register my Mac as a self-hosted GitHub Actions runner and run the exact same workflows, unchanged. Same checks, same merge gate — for about $0.
My GitHub Actions bill hit $489.85 in a single month — to check a pre-launch app with zero users. So I disabled the workflows and moved the pipeline onto local scripts run by a git hook, with a coding agent as the operator. New marginal cost: about zero.
Two commands before work: /audit to fill the backlog, /do-work to burn it down. By evening, 116 merged pull requests and 121 closed issues. The story of shipyard — an autonomous engineering loop built on Claude Code — and Lightwork, the app it helped ship. Both nights-and-weekends side projects.
A short note on what this site is for, the stack behind it, and what I plan to write about next.