Building GitHub Actions

Hello 👋

I'm Michael and I love GitHub Actions. I work on a team that built a complex platform that solves exactly the problems we needed it to. Of course, that came at a cost.

Data was stored across multiple repos, with various submodules and test suites that all needed to stay in sync. People were struggling to make changes because our workflows were... well they made doing your taxes look fun.

Our workflows were repetitive, yet somehow still error prone. Then GitHub Actions came along and solved all our problems. What was an involved process involving commits to multiple repos suddenly became as simple as merging a pull request. The time taken to validate changes and get them merged dropped from 20 minutes to 60 seconds overnight.

That was back in October 2018. Since then, I've built over a dozen GitHub Actions to automate our workflows with even more in the works. I've learned which libraries to use when building Actions, how to test them locally and how to build tools to make building Actions even easier. Now, I want to show you how to do the same