357 Seconds per Push, and the Tests Were Not the Problem
Our 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.
Patrick Lehmann
6 min read
Posts by
Patrick Lehmann
Architecture & Governance Lead
8 posts
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CI/CD Analytics: Where Pipeline Time Really Goes
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.
Patrick Lehmann
7 min read
Never Release to Test: Why we had to shift CI and AI agent governance left
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.
Patrick Lehmann
5 min read
Boards: a kanban that doesn't know where its cards are
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.
Patrick Lehmann
10 min read
Special vdev: 113 TB hanging on two files
The 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.
Patrick Lehmann
9 min read
Workbench: a delivery index that is allowed to be wrong
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.
Patrick Lehmann
6 min read
Env Manager: a secrets store that cannot read its own secrets
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.
Patrick Lehmann
6 min read
Observability: the read model that acts
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.
Patrick Lehmann
6 min read
