This site is built by one GitHub Actions workflow, portfolio-pages.yml. It assembles 1,300 free tools, the research pages, this blog and the development dashboard into a single static artifact, then deploys it to GitHub Pages. Until today, a push to main triggered it only when the changed files matched a hand-written paths: list.
That list was a promise that someone would remember every input the site is built from. Nobody could keep it.
What the filter missed
- Podcast audio. The writing section is getting a podcast: one episode per post, 15 so far, in
docs/podcast/. That folder was not on the list, so merging the episodes would not have redeployed the site. They would have appeared at the next unrelated merge, or within three hours from the scheduled run. - Research write-ups. The builder makes a page for every
research/<slug>/that has a README. Those READMEs were not on the list either, so a research result merged on its own did not reach the site. - New features. The list was edited four times in two days, each time to add paths a new part of the site needed. The last edit, for the daily engineering brief, landed while this change was open.
A path filter fails silently. The workflow stays green, and the page simply stops updating.
What we did instead
We removed the filter from the push trigger. Every merge to main now rebuilds and deploys the site. Pull-request builds keep a filter, because there the build is only a check.
The obvious worry is volume. main took 341 merges on 19 October. The workflow's concurrency group already handles that:
concurrency:
group: portfolio-pages-${{ github.ref }}
cancel-in-progress: falseGitHub keeps at most one pending run per group. When a newer run queues, the older pending one is cancelled. A burst of merges therefore becomes one running build plus one waiting build, and the site always catches up to the newest commit. The repository is public, so its runner minutes are not billed. The cost is runner time, which we will watch for starving other CI.
Takeaway
If your static site is built from most of the repository, an allow-list of paths is a bug waiting to happen. Trigger on every push and let concurrency coalesce the bursts. If that turns out too busy, exclude the few paths you know are irrelevant (paths-ignore) rather than list the many that matter.
The full write-up, with the verification and next steps, is in docs/reports/2026-10-20-pages-every-merge-and-podcasts.md.
Written with AI assistance (Claude).