Deploying code into production costs engineering teams. It’s not the dollar amount we care about but the time and attention engineers have to spend on the deployment. Projects with a complex release process, slow pipelines, or flakey steps are expensive to deploy. This cost feeds back into how we work and has detrimental effects on how we write code, work as a team, and run systems as professionals.

A Zero-cost Deployment is completely automated. Engineers are confident in the correctness …

Another year another lunar eclipse. I was visiting friends in Wanaka and we headed out to Lake Hawea to watch the eclipse. It was a clear frosty night which gave good views of the galactic core intersecting the horizon.

This year I was shooting with the Sony a7rii and 24-105mm f/4 lens. Not an ideal lens but the camera gives plenty of …

Continuous Delivery is a way of working which ensures our code is always in a releasable state. It encourages us to commit small iterative changes to our codebase, ensuring we are delivering value quickly to our customers and the likelihood of change failures and subsequent re-work is low. From a technical point of view master branch is always releasable. Deployments are kicked off manually by clicking a button.

Continuous Deployment takes this a step further. As soon as code has been committed …

Here is yet another answer to the perennial question of who is accessing my website and what pages are they looking at? A long time ago this website ran Google Analytics but I got put off by the privacy impact it has on users. I’ve since switched to another client side tracking solution Goat Counter which doesn’t uniquely track users and is open source.

These client side tracking solutions both slow the website down for users, and completely exclude the ever-growing segment of Ad and …