CI/CD Pipelines

What actually happens between a push and a live deploy — pipelines, caching, deployment strategies, rollbacks, and the security/cost tradeoffs nobody explains until a pipeline breaks in production.

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CI vs. CD vs. Continuous DeploymentThree words that get used as one. Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment are different promises, and mixing them up is the single most common CI/CD mistake in interviews.12 min
Anatomy of a PipelineStages, jobs, and steps aren't interchangeable words — they're nested structural units, and knowing which one you're looking at is how you read (and debug) any pipeline.15 min
GitHub Actions FundamentalsThe workflow YAML vocabulary that everything else in GitHub Actions is built from — on, jobs, steps, and the load-bearing difference between uses and run.15 min
Runners and EnvironmentsThe machine that actually executes your job — hosted vs. self-hosted, and matrix builds: running the same job across multiple versions at once, and when that's worth the extra minutes.15 min
Secrets and Environment VariablesHow a pipeline touches an API key without ever writing it into a YAML file, why secrets are automatically masked in logs — and the one common way people still leak them anyway.15 min
Caching DependenciesA cold install is the single biggest recurring cost in most pipelines. Caching turns a two-minute download into a ten-second restore — if the cache key is right.14 min
Build ArtifactsBuild once, deploy the exact bytes you tested — not a fresh rebuild that might not match. Artifacts are how one job hands its output to another.14 min
Testing in CIA test suite that only runs on your laptop only protects your laptop. Running it in CI is what makes it protect everyone.15 min
Linting and Static Checks as GatesRunning eslint locally is a nicety. Running it in CI and failing the build on it is a deliberate policy decision — and the two aren't redundant.13 min
Branch Protection and Required ChecksA green pipeline means nothing until you tell GitHub to treat it as a merge gate. Required status checks are how CI stops being advisory and starts being enforced.14 min
Deployment StrategiesBlue-green, canary, and rolling: three different answers to 'how do I swap old code for new code without an outage.'15 min
Environments and PromotionDev, staging, and production aren't just three names for 'where the app runs' — and rebuilding your app separately for each one is how 'works in staging' bugs get made.15 min