Building in Public #3: Going online, the hard way

This was the week Vorx left my laptop.

Nobody tells you that 'it works on my machine' is the easy ninety percent.

The plan: containerize the builder, deploy it, and have real builds running in the cloud by end of week. The reality: a beautiful parade of everything that's different between a laptop and a production container.

Every single online build failed

My favourite, in the way a bruise is your favourite: every single online build failed at the checkpoint-commit step. Every one. The cause? The container had no git identity, no user.name, no user.email, so every commit was refused. One config line. On my machine it had been set for fifteen years, which is exactly why I'd never think of it.

Then file permissions on the shared storage mount. Then the startup fix for the permissions problem taking so long it failed the deploy health probe. The fix for the fix needed a fix. At one point I was bumping a version number in the health endpoint just to prove to myself which code was actually running, like knocking on a wall to find the stud.

And then, through

I worked like an absolute dog through the weekend on this. Late nights, walk, back at it. And then it broke open. Online builds working, reliably, end to end. Apps building in the cloud for the first time. It's a huge milestone and I did a genuinely undignified celebration alone in my office.

The infrastructure fought back one more time: with multiple builds running at once, the shared verification browser deadlocked, so each build now gets its own from a pool, with a watchdog so nothing can hang silently. Concurrency: it's always concurrency.

Also this week: started the marketing site, and built a side-by-side demo, the same CRM as a VorxSync app and as a traditional request-response app, running next to each other.

Watching the sync version respond instantly while the standard one spins its little spinners is the entire pitch, no words needed.