kodepilot.dev - posts

The disk is lava: generate your test certs in memory

You can't out-engineer the speed of light, only avoid the distance. Grace Hopper, the computing pioneer, made that physical: she handed people a length of wire and called it a nanosecond, about thirty centimeters, the distance light travels in a billionth of a second. A microsecond was three hundred meters of it. Generating a certificate is about twenty kilometers of that wire; reading one off disk is sixty; fetching it from network storage is hundreds. Same units, very different trips. A test that reads a cert from disk takes the long one, and committed a private key to your repo to do it. Generate it instead.

You're not testing the standard library

When a test needs a TLS cert it's tempting to treat it as precious and check it in. But you're almost never testing "does P-256 signing work" or "is the handshake correct": you trust crypto/tls and crypto/x509 for that, the same way you trust the compiler. You're testing your logic: that your option builder wires the cert into the transport, that your chain verification accepts a good chain and rejects a broken one, that your load-cert-from-a-path API reads the file.

Read more →

Peer review without the peer pressure

You add a review step to your coding agent. It takes the diff and runs the same review on a few different models, subagent(kind: "review", model: "gpt-5.6-sol"), subagent(kind: "review", model: "opus-…

Read more →

Key signing party for small teams

To make key signings as efficient as possible it's important that all participants comes prepared. We avoid using Key Servers, since they are flakey, slow and might publish more information than you w…

Read more →

Configuring Web Key Directory for GPG

Web Key Directory (WKD) is a proposal for a new way to discover other users keys, using HTTP and TLS. In short it looks up the UID on the users host. This works since all UIDs are email address, and a…

Read more →

Dealing with hostnames, domains and environments

Unless you've completely jumped on the container band wagon you probably still need to maintain a number of stateful servers, which typically live in a number of environments, like dev, stg and prd. Y…

Read more →