Bertie’s [Experimental] Blog

There is a gap between “I understand CI/CD in theory” and “I have built one and watched it work.” This post closes that gap. We will build a complete, production-patterned GitOps pipeline from scratch — running entirely on your local machine, at zero cost — and walk through every stage from raising a pull request to deploying to production. The two repos for this tutorial are: service-demo — the application code, Helm chart, and GitHub Actions workflows gitops-demo — the GitOps source of truth: ArgoCD configuration, environment values, and infrastructure bootstrap What We Are Building Developer pushes feature branch → PR opened → CI: lint, SCA, unit tests, integration tests → Image built → pushed to GHCR → Ephemeral environment pr-{N} deployed by ArgoCD (dev cluster) → Smoke tests run against ephemeral env → CODEOWNER approves → PR merged → CD: image built from main → main-{sha} → ArgoCD syncs preprod namespace (preprod cluster) → Full test suite runs against preprod → Check run posted to merge commit (release gate) → [Manual] Release workflow triggered → Preflight: HEAD commit must have passing preprod gate → Image retagged: main-{sha} → v{X.Y.Z} (no rebuild) → ArgoCD syncs prod namespace (prod cluster) → ArgoCD syncs dev namespace (dev cluster) — same tag, same bits For this tutorial, all four environments run as Kubernetes namespaces on a single local kind cluster — simple to bootstrap and zero infrastructure cost. In production the topology is different: ephemeral environments and dev share a single dev cluster, while preprod and prod each get their own. More on this in Production Considerations. ...

The world of AI is shifting from chatbots that talk to agents that do. Over the past few months I’ve been building a self-hosted “24/7 Jarvis” that lives on my local hardware. This post is the full story — from picking the right OS to shipping a fully automated deployment pipeline. All the code lives in the openclaw-journey repo. The README is a TL;DR if you’re in a hurry; this post goes deeper. ...

This post exercises the full range of text and code rendering. Everything here is drawn from the actual configuration files used to build and style this blog — no contrived examples. Typography Regular paragraph text at 1.05rem / Inter. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin commodo, urna vel gravida scelerisque, neque velit aliquam nunc, nec sodales risus libero at dolor. ...