Devops

I push a feature branch a dozen times a week. Every single time, the dance is the same: git push, switch to the browser, click the “Create MR” button, set assignee, set reviewer, add labels, wait for CI, click merge, switch back to terminal, git checkout main, git pull, git branch -d feature/.... It’s not hard. It’s just tedious — and the kind of friction that adds up over a week.

I had a shell script glued together with glab, gh, jq, yq, and gum doing this for years. It worked, but it broke whenever any of those tools updated and was a pain to ship to a fresh laptop. So I rewrote the whole thing in Go and called it auto-mr. One binary, no external CLIs, works on both GitLab and GitHub.

Every shell scripter has, at some point, googled “date subtract day mac” or “GNU date macOS BSD difference” and wished they hadn’t. The date command is one of the most platform-fragmented tools in any Unix toolbox: GNU date and BSD date disagree on basically every flag that matters. And once you’ve worked out the syntax for “yesterday,” you still need to do something useful with it — like generate a range of timestamps for a backfill, or compute end-of-month, or skip weekends.

I got tired of this. So I wrote calcdate. Same binary on Linux, macOS, anywhere. One expression syntax. Version 2 just landed and the syntax is now genuinely pleasant to use.

Once you start using Claude Code seriously, you accumulate prompts. A snippet that always produces the right golangci.yml. A spell that turns “I need a GitLab CI pipeline” into a working .gitlab-ci.yml. A code-review checklist you keep pasting in. After enough copy-paste, the obvious move is to package those into proper Claude Code plugins. That’s what claude-plugins is.

There’s a category of bash one-liners I keep rewriting: “run this thing, and if it fails, try again a few times with a delay.” curl against a service that’s still booting. A kubectl rollout status that flickers. A flaky integration test. A docker pull from a registry having a bad five seconds.

You can write the loop yourself in five lines of bash. I’ve done it hundreds of times. But I always forget the exit code handling, the sleep arithmetic, the cap on retries. So I wrote retry — a single binary that does exactly this, with proper exponential backoff if you want it.

Working across large repositories that mix multiple technologies is common in modern software teams. Keeping everyone aligned on the same tool versions, environment variables, and runtimes has always been a friction point — until I started using Mise (mise-en-place).

It has since replaced several tools on my machine (goodbye nvm, reduced Homebrew usage) and become my go-to for managing development environments, both locally and in CI.