Engineering write-ups about the systems actually running at Squibble — architecture, infrastructure, and the decisions behind them.https://www.squibble.chen-UShttps://www.squibble.ch/en/blog/2026-08/push-gate-bind-mounthttps://www.squibble.ch/en/blog/2026-08/push-gate-bind-mountOur pre-push gate took almost six minutes. The container read the repository through a bind mount, and that alone accounted for 324 of the 357 seconds.Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTdockerdeveloper-experienceperformancetestingmacoshttps://www.squibble.ch/en/blog/2026-08/cicd-analyticshttps://www.squibble.ch/en/blog/2026-08/cicd-analyticsA slow or failed pipeline is only a symptom. Workbench connects wasted runner time, job trends, and pipeline waterfalls in one investigation—from the aggregate signal to the exact merge request attempt.Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTgitlabci-cdanalyticsdeveloper-experiencereliabilityhttps://www.squibble.ch/en/blog/2026-08/never-release-to-testhttps://www.squibble.ch/en/blog/2026-08/never-release-to-test16,300 CI minutes in a single week, 18.9% complete waste, and 22 release attempts for a single app: Why releases were abused as test environments, how AI agents silently ignore uninitialised standards, and how a three-tiered filter solved the problem.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTci-cdgitlabaiarchitecturemonorepohttps://www.squibble.ch/en/blog/2026-08/workbench-boardshttps://www.squibble.ch/en/blog/2026-08/workbench-boardsEvery board eventually fails the same way — it remembers which column a card is in, and from then on that memory has to be maintained. Workbench never records it: columns are rules, evaluated on read.Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTgitlabrailsreactpostgresqlarchitecturehttps://www.squibble.ch/en/blog/2026-08/special-vdevhttps://www.squibble.ch/en/blog/2026-08/special-vdevThe special vdev of a 113 TB pool sat on two qcow2 files — both on the same consumer SSD, with 11% of its endurance left. Moving it meant operating on a live mirror with no room to be wrong. And it surfaced two checks that had been pointed at the wrong thing the whole time.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTzfsproxmoxansiblestorageoperationshttps://www.squibble.ch/en/blog/2026-08/workbenchhttps://www.squibble.ch/en/blog/2026-08/workbenchWe built a multi-tenant view across several GitLab instances without becoming a second source of truth. The design rule that made it work: the local database is disposable, and reconciliation — not webhooks — is what makes it correct.Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTgitlabrailsmulti-tenancypostgresqlarchitecturehttps://www.squibble.ch/en/blog/2026-07/env-managerhttps://www.squibble.ch/en/blog/2026-07/env-managerA security review pointed out that our secrets manager trusted its own administrators. The fix was zero-knowledge end-to-end encryption — and the honest part of the design is the list of three places where the server still sees plaintext, and why we accepted each one.Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTsecretscryptographygitlabrailsarchitecturehttps://www.squibble.ch/en/blog/2026-06/observabilityhttps://www.squibble.ch/en/blog/2026-06/observabilityWorkbench could drop its database and rebuild it. This one polls Graylog and files GitLab issues — and a side effect has no upstream. Why dry-run became a database column, why the dashboard has no delete button, and why the safety guard sits at the HTTP boundary rather than in configuration.Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTobservabilitygrayloggitlabrailsarchitecture