Shipping faster with CI

Speed and safety sound like opposites. A good CI pipeline makes them the same thing: you ship faster because the gates catch the mistakes for you.

Make the pipeline the source of truth

If it passes in CI, it is releasable. That only holds when CI runs the same checks every time, on every change, with no "works on my machine" escape hatch. Keep the steps fast and ordered cheapest-first so failures surface in seconds, not minutes.

steps:
  - run: pnpm install --frozen-lockfile
  - run: pnpm check      # types
  - run: pnpm test       # unit
  - run: pnpm build      # the real build gate

Gate on what actually breaks

• Types catch the renamed field before it ships.
• Tests catch the logic you changed without meaning to.
• A real build catches what types and tests miss — a bad import, a missing env var, a prerender that fails against the database.

Keep it fast

A pipeline nobody wants to wait for is a pipeline people route around. Cache dependencies, run independent jobs in parallel, and put the slow end-to-end suite on its own track so it never blocks a one-line fix.

Deploy should be boring

The last step is the least dramatic: a green pipeline hands off to an automated release. No manual steps, no ceremony, nothing to remember at 6pm on a Friday. When deploying is boring, you deploy often — and shipping often is the whole advantage a small team has.