CI/CD & Cortados: A Love Story
Case study showing how trimming a CI/CD pipeline to “cortado size” slashed build times, cut deploy pain, and kept code (and caffeine) flowing smoothly.
CI/CD & Cortados: A Love Story
When the afternoon slump looms, I wander to my neighborhood café for a cortado—equal parts bold espresso and silky steamed milk. It’s the perfect balance: no sugar rush, no milk overload, just a smooth jolt that lets me push code to prod with steady hands. Over time, I realized my ideal CI/CD pipeline feels a lot like that cortado: small, balanced, and delightfully reliable.
“Ship small, stay warm.” — a barista-turned-engineer friend of mine.
The Ingredients
| Cortado Component | Pipeline Parallel |
|---|---|
| 1 shot espresso (intense flavor) | Unit tests (quick validation) |
| 1 shot steamed milk (smooth finish) | Automated build & deploy (polished delivery) |
| 4 oz glass (compact vessel) | Lightweight workflow file (single-page GitHub Action) |
Stick to one CI service (e.g., GitHub Actions) unless you really need a multi-cloud setup. The fewer beans you blend, the clearer the flavor.
The Flow at a Glance
A cortado is only ~120 ml, yet packs all the punch of a full latte. Likewise, this pipeline averages 3–4 minutes per run—fast enough for trunk-based development.
Brew-Inspired Best Practices
-
Pre-warm the cup → Cache dependencies.
Warming a glass keeps espresso from cooling too fast; caching NPM/PyPI packages shaves ~40 s from each build. -
Steam just to 60 °C → Fail fast.
Over-heated milk scalds; long-running flaky tests sour dev morale. Aim for crisp, deterministic checks. -
Serve immediately → Auto-deploy on merge.
Milk and coffee separate if they sit. So does fresh code. Ship while it’s hot.
Even a tiny spill can ruin your laptop—and a leaked API key can ruin your week. Use encrypted store variables and rotate often.
My Daily Ritual
- Commit & Push – Fingers fly, latte art inspiration looms.
- Order Cortado – 90 seconds at the bar; pipeline already in motion.
- Sip & Watch – By the fourth sip the tests are green.
- Celebrate the Deploy – Cortado finished, feature live, caffeine level perfect.
After a month of pairing cortados with trunk-based CI/CD, our average time to prod dropped from 22 min to 8 min. The café knows my order by heart, and prod incidents dropped by 35%.
Final Sip
A good cortado doesn’t hide flaws—it spotlights them in a smaller cup. Your CI/CD should do the same: expose issues early, deliver flavor quickly, and leave you energized, not jittery. Next time you brew a tiny espresso-milk masterpiece, think about squeezing unnecessary steps out of your pipeline. Small cup, small diff, big payoff.