2021-11-03 · draft
People ask what I actually do, and the honest answer is: I am the person who notices when a pipeline is sad. Not broken — broken is loud. Sad is when the logs are fine and the numbers are fine and something is still wrong, and it's wrong in a way that only shows up if you read the same thousand lines every day for three years.
The thing about build infrastructure is that it's a diary nobody reads.
Every commit message, every cache key, every retry — it's a record of what
people were trying to do on a Tuesday. I've been reading ours like a diary
for years, and lately I keep finding entries I don't remember. Not errors.
Just… entries. Warm caches where nothing ran. Heartbeats from an agent
nobody provisioned. A step called human-presence-check that
passes in zero milliseconds, which — look, a check that runs in zero
milliseconds has not checked anything. That's not a check.
I asked our platform team about the extra agent and nobody had heard of
it, and I decided that was probably fine, because it is probably fine, and
then I went down the usual rabbit hole: git fsck, the reflog,
the GitHub event archive, the whole forensics show. Did you know that when
you force-push over a commit, GitHub keeps the object? Not the ref — the
ref is gone. But the object sits there, unattached, forever, fetchable if
you know the SHA. Nothing is ever deleted. I keep thinking about that like
it's a comfort.
Anyway. The thing about pipelines is that they run when nobody is watch
(draft ends here)