For me, DevOps is not a separate role but a collection of practices that make software delivery more reliable and enjoyable. In this category, I share practical observations about automation, CI/CD, deployments, infrastructure, and the tools I use while building personal and commercial projects.
In ICanUp, I wanted Jira issues to move automatically when a GitLab Merge Request was created and merged, but I did not want automation to own the entire issue lifecycle. I explain why I kept only two automatic transitions, how target branch and current status guards protect the workflow, and why repeated webhook events must remain idempotent.
While starting AVN Documentation AI locally, I almost ran out of disk space. Docker Build Cache had grown to about 29 GB, images occupied more than 31 GB, and the filesystem reached 99-100% usage. I show how I found the cause, why a conservative prune barely helped, and how I safely reclaimed tens of gigabytes.
All VITE_REVERB_* values were present in the server .env, yet the production bundle was still built without them. I traced the problem to the GitLab CI build stage, moved the build-time variables into the correct environment scope, and added fail-fast checks before deployment.
For me, CI/CD is not just automated deployment. In my Laravel project, I use a pipeline that checks code quality, runs tests, builds the frontend, and only then allows the application to move toward deployment.
While renewing a Sectigo SSL certificate, DCV stayed in progress even though the verification file returned 200 OK. I traced it to a stale token and different HTTP and HTTPS validation paths in Nginx, then completed the renewal safely.
SSH to GitLab works on the host, but Composer inside Docker asks for a username and password or fails with Permission denied (publickey). I show how I diagnosed the issue in Laradock and forwarded the host SSH Agent into the container.
I show how I configured Laradock for PHP 8.3, 8.4 and 8.5 and replaced long Docker commands with simple dphp, dartisan and dcomposer wrappers.
Sometimes a familiar process can be presented in a completely different way. That's exactly what I noticed when I first worked with a different CI/CD tool.