How to Add a Health Check to a Raid Workflow
- Published
- Author
Alex Salerno
Use the Raid `Wait` task to block on HTTP endpoints or TCP ports until a service is healthy — and pair it with `Group` for retry semantics on flaky deps.
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Articles, Announcements, and More
Blog posts on software, systems, and side projects—everything I'm building, learning, or thinking about.
How to Clone All Your Team's Repos with raid install
- Published
- Author
- Alex Salerno
Bootstrap a multi-repo workspace in one command. `raid install` clones every repo in your profile in parallel, runs install tasks, and is fully idempotent.
Read moreHow to Add a raid.yaml to an Existing Repo
- Published
- Author
- Alex Salerno
Commit a raid.yaml to any repo so the Raid CLI can run its commands, environments, and install steps — and merge them with the team profile automatically.
Read moreHow to Create a Raid Profile
- Published
- Author
- Alex Salerno
Create a Raid CLI profile five ways: interactive wizard, hand-written YAML, an existing raid.yaml, a Git URL, or a raw file URL. With trade-offs and a decision guide.
Read moreHow to Debug a Failing Raid Task
- Published
- Author
- Alex Salerno
Diagnose Raid failures fast: read the exit-code category, decode the structured error envelope, use `raid context`, and apply per-task `continueOnFailure` for noisy steps.
Read moreHow to Define a Custom Command in Raid
- Published
- Author
- Alex Salerno
Define a custom `raid <name>` command by composing the eleven built-in task types — Shell, Script, Git, HTTP, Wait, Template, Prompt, Confirm, Print, Set, and Group.
Read moreHow to Give Your AI Coding Agent Context Across Multiple Repos
- Published
- Author
- Alex Salerno
AI coding agents work much better when they can see your whole workspace. Here's how to give Claude Code, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible agent context across every repo at once.
Read moreHow to Eliminate Developer Toil on a Multi-Repo Team
- Published
- Author
- Alex Salerno
Developer toil — the manual setup, the stale wiki, the "what's the command for that again?" Slack thread — is fixable. Here's how to cut it systematically.
Read moreHow to Install Raid on macOS, Linux, and Windows
- Published
- Author
- Alex Salerno
Install the Raid CLI on macOS, Linux, or Windows — stable and preview channels, verifying the install, upgrading, and uninstalling.
Read moreHow to Keep Dev, Staging, and Prod Environments in Sync
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- Author
- Alex Salerno
Environment drift is the silent cause of "passed in staging, failed in prod" incidents. Here's a model for keeping them in sync without a config-management framework.
Read moreHow to Make "It Works on My Machine" Actually Mean Something
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- Author
- Alex Salerno
The phrase is a meme because it's almost never true. Here's how to make local development environments consistent enough that 'works on my machine' becomes a real signal.
Read moreHow to Manage Multiple Repositories Without Losing Your Mind
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- Author
- Alex Salerno
Multi-repo (polyrepo) development gets a bad reputation it doesn't deserve. The problem isn't the repos — it's the lack of a layer above them. Here's the layer.
Read moreHow to Migrate from Make, Taskfile, or Just to Raid
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- Author
- Alex Salerno
Move from per-project task runners (Make / Taskfile / Just / docker-compose) to Raid for multi-repo orchestration — with side-by-side conversions and a wrap-don't-replace strategy.
Read moreHow to Onboard a New Developer in Under an Hour
- Published
- Author
- Alex Salerno
Most engineering onboarding takes days. It doesn't have to. Here's the shape of an onboarding flow where a new hire is running the stack and making commits the same morning.
Read moreHow to Run Tasks in Parallel with Raid
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- Author
- Alex Salerno
Use `concurrent: true` and Group `parallel: true` to fan out Raid tasks across CPU cores — with the safety rules, output prefixing, and when not to parallelize.
Read moreHow to Share a Raid Profile with Your Team
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- Author
- Alex Salerno
Distribute a Raid CLI profile across a team — Git repo, raw URL, or committed-in-monorepo — with versioning, rollout, and update strategies.
Read moreHow to Stop Maintaining a 50-Line Bash Setup Script
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- Author
- Alex Salerno
Every team has the script. It works until it doesn't. Here's how to replace `setup.sh` with something the team can actually rely on — without rewriting your tools.
Read moreHow to Switch Environments with raid env
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- Author
- Alex Salerno
Use `raid env <name>` to switch every repo in your profile to local, staging, or production at once — variable scoping, repo overrides, and the merge rules.
Read moreHow to Use Raid as an MCP Server for AI Agents
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- Author
- Alex Salerno
Run `raid context serve` to expose your multi-repo workspace to AI agents over MCP — six tools, six resources, JSON-RPC over stdio, no network exposure.
Read moreHow to Use Templates and Prompts in Raid Tasks
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- Author
- Alex Salerno
Build interactive Raid workflows: collect input with Prompt and Confirm, generate files from templates with the Template task, and stay safe in headless / CI mode.
Read moreHow to Wire Raid into CI
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- Author
- Alex Salerno
Run Raid in CI without prompts or hangs: `--yes` / `--headless` flags, `--json` output, exit-code categories, and patterns for GitHub Actions and friends.
Read moreMake vs Taskfile vs Just vs Raid: Picking a Task Runner in 2026
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- Author
- Alex Salerno
Make, Taskfile, Just, and Raid each solve different problems. Here's an honest comparison — what each is best at, where each falls short, and how to pick.
Read moreMonorepo vs Polyrepo: A Third Option for the Developer Experience
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- Author
- Alex Salerno
The monorepo-vs-polyrepo debate frames the wrong axis. Most teams don't actually need to pick — they need a layer above their repos that handles team-level orchestration.
Read moreHow to Write a Runbook Your Team Actually Follows
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- Author
- Alex Salerno
Most runbooks rot the day after they're written. The fix isn't a better wiki — it's making the runbook executable and version-controlled so the team can't ignore it.
Read moreWhy Your Developer Setup Is Slow (and How to Fix It)
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- Author
- Alex Salerno
Slow developer setup is rarely about hardware. It's almost always about coordination overhead — and it has a recognizable shape that's worth diagnosing before throwing tools at it.
Read moreBuilding Uppy: A Technical Deep Dive
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- Author
- Alex Salerno
A silly co-op multiplayer browser game built entirely on the Cloudflare edge stack. Why Durable Objects are the right primitive for multiplayer state, the math behind the cooldown that makes the game cooperative instead of competitive, and what it taught me about WebSockets at scale.
Read moreBuilding Raid: A Technical Deep Dive
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- Author
- Alex Salerno
A year after the design proposal, an honest retrospective on _Raid_ — the multi-repo workflow orchestrator I built to escape my own toil. Architecture, key design decisions (including agent-native MCP integration), what got cut, and what I learned along the way.
Read moreRaid: A Tool for Orchestrating Distributed Application Development
- Published
- Author
- Alex Salerno
My design proposal for Raid, an open-source command-line tool that streamlines development across distributed codebases. Raid orchestrates tasks, environments, and dependencies through a simple, configurable YAML system.
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