Series
A series about the systems actually running at Squibble — what they solve, how they are put together, and what we learned building them.
6 posts
Workbench 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.
A 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.
We 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.
Every 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.
16,300 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.
A 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.
