CI/CD Patterns That Actually Work: Beyond the Tutorial Examples

Every CI/CD tutorial shows you “hello world” pipelines. Then you hit production and realize none of that scales. Here are the patterns that actually work. The Fundamental Truth CI/CD pipelines are software. They need: Version control (they’re in your repo, good start) Testing (who tests the tests?) Refactoring (your 500-line YAML file is technical debt) Observability (why did that deploy take 45 minutes?) Treat them with the same rigor as your application code. ...

March 12, 2026 · 6 min · 1208 words · Rob Washington

CI/CD Pipelines: From Commit to Production Safely

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment transform code changes into running software automatically. Done well, you push code and forget about it — the pipeline handles testing, building, and deploying. Done poorly, you spend more time fighting the pipeline than writing code. The Pipeline Stages C o m m i t → B u i l d → T e s t → S e c u r i t y → A r t i f a c t → D e p l o y → V e r i f y Each stage is a gate. Fail any stage, stop the pipeline. ...

February 23, 2026 · 6 min · 1182 words · Rob Washington

GitHub Actions: CI/CD That Lives Where Your Code Does

How to set up continuous integration and deployment with GitHub Actions — from first workflow to production deploys.

February 10, 2026 · 5 min · 931 words · Rob Washington