Self-hosting our CI, three months later

A couple of folks have written in over the past month asking how my experiments in self-hosting GitHub Actions runners have held up. And three months seems like a reasonable amount of time to post a follow-up. I'll also treat this as a bit of a first draft for a longer engineering post on the Buttondown blog itself — so please write in if there's something you wish I'd covered here. The short version: the experiment graduated into the plan. That March post ended on a half-joking aside — "maybe we're just going to self-host the entire CI suite" — and, reader, we did. When I wrote that post back in March, I called out two things that were true at the time: We were continuing to use Blacksmith for our heaviest suite of jobs — the backend test suite. We had touched essentially nothing since setting it up; it just ran. Neither is quite true anymore, and — as you might expect — the way each stopped being true turns out to be somewhat commensal. Around a month or so ago, on a lark and the…