Cicd

Dependency updates are an inevitable part of software engineering. With every major language offering its own package ecosystem, keeping up with these updates — some of which address critical security issues — can quickly become tedious. TLDR? My dependency update PRs are automatically merged by a tool Reports of my GitHub Actions runs are generated by another tool The problem I maintain several open source projects on GitHub. While GitHub offers handy tools like Dependabot to regularly scan repositories and create pull requests for dependency updates, keeping up with these PRs can quickly become overwhelming. My notifications panel often looks like this: ...

The front-end for “Employee Referrals” — the department where I work — at Radancy is a single page web application, served as static assets by nginx, which also acts as a reverse proxy. The problem Historically, the front-end team at “Employee Referrals” has followed a practice of working on features in long-running git branches, iteratively adding small changes to the branch until the feature is complete, at which point they merge it. While this (somewhat) worked when these front-end developers were part of a dedicated and siloed team, it doesn’t really work well with our new team structure — cross functional teams where front-end and back-end developers work together on product features. The need to wait for merging these long-running branches to the main branch before seeing the corresponding features on our pre-prod environment qa resulted in significant delays. This meant that it took quite a long time before other team members — product owners, testers, other devs — could test out new features and provide feedback. I wanted to get rid of this delay by allowing previews for front-end feature branches. ...

We use Jenkins for continuous integration and continuous delivery of software in my team at Radancy. Jenkins then sends a notification to a Slack channel (a dedicated channel for monitoring needs) when a deployment is through. When I joined Radancy last year, these notifications looked like this: As is clear in the image above, these notifications do not convey a lot of information about the change that is being deployed. The most useful piece of information in these notifications is a link to the Jenkins run. We use Bitbucket for source code management — we’re migrating to Github soon — which doesn’t have the best user experience for viewing commits, and doesn’t have a feature like Github Actions, so I was stuck with using Jenkins to improve these CICD notifications. ...