I could not sleep, so I built a deploy pipeline
A 1 AM story about insomnia, webhooks, and how this very post reached your screen.
It was 1 AM. I was not tired, exactly. I was that specific flavour of awake where your brain decides the most reasonable thing to do is not count sheep, but solve a problem you did not have four hours ago.
The problem, according to 1 AM me, was this: publishing a post to this site involved me, personally, doing boring, repetitive things. The kind of things a computer should be a little embarrassed to make a human do.
So I got up. In the dark. Like a raccoon with a keyboard.
The dream
I wanted this: I write a post, I save it, I push it, and then I do nothing. The site notices, rebuilds itself, and the new post appears. No ceremony. No me clicking around.
The digital equivalent of leaving a note on the fridge and having the fridge make dinner.
The plan (as narrated by a very awake person)
It is embarrassingly simple once you say it out loud. When I push my writing up, the place it lives sends a little nudge, a webhook, which is just a fancy word for “hey, something happened.” My server hears the nudge and thinks ah, that is my cue.
Then it runs a small script I wrote in the state a doctor would describe as “should probably be asleep.” The script grabs the new writing, rebuilds the site, and swaps the new version in. All on its own, while I am ideally unconscious.
The post you are reading took exactly that path. Nobody touched anything. If it is on your screen, the raccoon won.
The part where it did not work
Naturally, it did not work the first time. Or the second. There was a stretch where I was fairly sure I had broken the entire site, which is a wonderful feeling to have when your only witness is a mug of tea you forgot to drink.
The classic bugs showed up. A path that was almost right. A permission the server did not have and was very quiet about it. A script that ran perfectly and did absolutely nothing, which is somehow worse than an error.
But that is the thing about 1 AM projects. No meeting to get to, no one waiting. Just you, the problem, and an unreasonable amount of patience you would never have during daylight.
The 2 AM victory
It clicked around 2. I pushed a tiny change, walked away, and a minute later the site had quietly updated itself. No hands. No me. Just a webhook whispering to a server and a script doing its little job in the dark.
Mostly I felt the specific smugness of a person who has automated a task they will now perform roughly once a week. The math does not work. The math never works. That was never the point.
The point is that now, when a post idea shows up at some ungodly hour, I can just write it and let go. Anyway. It is late, and this post is about to prove itself by existing on your screen at all.
Goodnight. Or good morning. I honestly could not tell you which.