Automation

For a long time my certificates renewed the way most people’s do: a calendar reminder, a manual certbot run, and a quiet hope that I’d remember before the thing actually expired. It worked. It worked right up until the morning a service threw cert errors at me and I had no idea why, because the renewal cron had been silently failing for weeks. That’s the part nobody tells you about manual TLS. The failure doesn’t announce itself. The cert just expires, usually at the worst possible moment, and you find out because a browser is yelling at someone. Renewal knowledge ends up living in one person’s head. Teams skip HTTPS on internal services because wiring it up by hand is annoying enough to put off. ...

For a long time I thought the problem was me. I have AuDHD: the combination of autism and ADHD. Specifically ADHD-PI, the inattentive variant, without the hyperactivity most people picture when they hear ADHD. For years I treated that as a defect to overcome. I bought the planners. I read the productivity books. I told myself that next Monday I’d finally be disciplined. This post is the story of how that approach failed, what I built instead, and why the systems I ended up depending on turn out to be good engineering for anyone. ...

Picture the end state first. You merge a branch to main, walk away to get coffee, and by the time you’re back the project has a new version tag, a fresh changelog entry, and a GitLab release with notes written from your commits. Nobody decided “is this 1.4.0 or 1.3.5?” because nobody had to. The version fell out of the work itself. That’s where I want to get to in this post. I run a self-hosted GitLab and I do not want versioning to be a thing I think about. A version number that someone picks by hand is a tiny black box: it depends on whether that person remembered the rules, was paying attention, and agreed with everyone else about what counts as a breaking change. I would rather the number be a consequence of the commits, something I can inspect and reproduce. ...