GitHub Actions: Niche and Unexpected Uses
Beyond CI/CD: weird, wonderful, and surprisingly practical things you can build with GitHub Actions—from chess games in issues to SSL certificate monitoring.
Beyond CI/CD: weird, wonderful, and surprisingly practical things you can build with GitHub Actions—from chess games in issues to SSL certificate monitoring.
Complete, battle-tested GitHub Actions workflows from real projects. The full YAML, the bugs we hit, the lessons learned, and the evolution from first commit to production.
When GitHub's runners aren't enough—whether it's cost, performance, or that Mac Mini in your closet—here's how to run your own infrastructure for Actions.
Slow CI is a productivity killer. Here's how to slash your GitHub Actions workflow times—with real examples, benchmarks, and the caching strategies that actually work.
Push and pull_request are just the beginning. Here's how to trigger workflows from Slack, schedule nightly builds, chain workflows together, and turn GitHub into a surprisingly capable automation platform.
Your GitHub Actions workflows have access to your secrets, your code, and your deployment pipelines. Here's how to lock them down before someone else does.
Your GitHub Actions workflows don't have to be unmaintainable YAML spaghetti. Here are the design patterns, refactoring techniques, and organizational strategies that keep workflows clean as they grow.
GitHub Actions can do way more than run your tests. Here's a tour of the surprising, useful, and occasionally weird things people build with workflows—and the start of a series going deeper.
I built a CLI that converts documentation docsets to Markdown files—because Apple's online docs don't work without JavaScript, and I don't want MCPs in my workflow.
I've been building command-line tools for my own workflows, and I've learned a few things about what makes a CLI actually pleasant to use. Here's what I wish someone had told me earlier.