op, mprocs
Two small tooling changes that have been really nice for us at Buttondown:
1Password CLI
A long-standing annoyance has been dealing with secrets and coordinating their rollout across CI, plus a bunch of Heroku instances, plus a bunch of Vercel instances, plus maybe a local box if you need them for critical debugging.
Historically, we did this by using whatever was in the production Heroku app as the source of truth and syncing and linking as much as we could. But with our pending migration to AWS, this approach, which was already crufty, now had two more problems. It had an expiration date, since I believe we are getting rid of the production Heroku app.
And suddenly the number of services to which we need to sync secrets has doubled. Our solution was to do the thing that I always wanted to do but could never quite summon the effort, which was standardize on using 1Password and their CLI. This worked pretty painlessly. We've got a single entry in 1Password that represents all of the environment variables that we need for a given environment and we read from that before deploying. Rolling a key now requires one subsequent change (adding it to 1Password).
mprocs
We've long used Overmind to orchestrate our local dev servers. It is -- was! -- fine, but it carries a steady drip of paper cuts — chiefly the inability to focus a single process's log output and the inability to restart a process from inside the running session. Individually trivial; collectively, hit many times a day, worth fixing.
mprocs is a TUI process manager that solves exactly those. It pages between processes, scopes scrollback to the selected one, and starts/stops/restarts any process in place — no tmux, no external socket dance. After a week of piloting it, we switched over. It's been great.