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devmachine

3 posts with the tag “devmachine”

Local-First GitHub Actions Strategy

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Alberto Miorin

If you’ve spent any significant time with GitHub Actions (GHA), you know the drill: it can be a massive time-saver, but when things go wrong, the development loop is painfully slow. Committing, pushing, waiting for the run to fail, and then repeating… it’s a productivity killer. Over time, I’ve refined a strategy that cuts this frustrating cycle short. My philosophy is simple: Avoid any GitHub Actions feature that isn’t available or easy to replicate locally.

Configuration Hell? How BigConfig Tames the Modern Dev Environment

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Alberto Miorin

Setting up a local development environment today is rarely a trivial matter. The days of simply git clone and npm install are long gone. Modern architectures, particularly those embracing microservices, polyglot persistence, and cloud-native practices, have turned the humble setup process into a multi-layered nightmare.

If you’ve ever spent an afternoon debugging why your local database port clashes with your integration environment, or wrestled with five different tools requiring three different credential formats, you know the pain.

Let’s dive into a concrete example — a complex but typical setup — and see how BigConfig transforms this chaos into an automated, zero-cost development experience.

Why Ansible Still Rules for Your Dev Environment

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Alberto Miorin

Back in the day, before Red Hat acquired Ansible, I was using it to provision Cloudera clusters in massive data centers. And let me tell you, its killer feature wasn’t some complex, enterprise-grade capability. It was pure simplicity.

You just needed SSH, and you were ready to go. The feedback loop was in seconds—a refreshing change from the slow, manual processes we were used to. It was a DevOps dream.

Then came Docker. For many use cases, containers were the new king. They offered a more lightweight, portable solution for shipping applications. And for a while, it seemed like Ansible might get relegated to the history books.

But not so fast. While Docker took over for application deployment, Ansible found its true calling: provisioning the remote development environment.