I'm a senior software engineer with almost six years of experience, mostly in Rails and React. For the past several years, I've been the only engineer at my company.
That means I own everything—architecture, implementation, deploys, firefighting. It also means I don't have anyone to tell me when I'm doing something weird.
I've worked on teams before. I know the value of code review, of someone asking "why not just...?" before you're three layers deep in a bad abstraction. I miss that. So I'm trying to build it for myself, here.
This series is called "Am I Doing This Right?" and the premise is simple: I'll walk through something I've built or a decision I've made, explain my reasoning, and invite you to weigh in. Tell me how your team does it. Tell me I'm overcomplicating it. Tell me about the footgun I haven't noticed yet.
I'm not looking for validation. I'm looking for the perspective that comes from working with other engineers—something I don't get day-to-day.
First up: a GitHub Actions workflow that posts to Slack with recent commits and links to SOPs whenever we deploy. It's a small thing, but it touches CI/CD, team communication, and documentation habits, so there's plenty to pick apart.
Top comments (2)
I'm all for automating anything I possibly can to eliminate just one more click in the process—I do it all the time. 😀 Your Slack integration, depending on what it is, you might be able to simplify and save the GHA run. GitHub makes a slack integration, which comes in very handy once you figure out how to set it up. I don't think the commits come enabled by default, you'd have to do something like
/github subscribe org/repo-name commits.It's a pain when you have a billion repos, but once it's set things rarely change there. Plus, you get the unfurled links in any channel it's installed in automatically and communication goes both ways. So you can send it commands in Slack that will execute on GitHub.
Ashley thank you!
I just posted my followup with the details of the project. If you're inclined with a few minutes to spare, take a look and let me know your thoughts on my solution!