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Blacksmith Blog

Launch: GitHub Actions Analytics

February 25, 2025

Blacksmith now provides unprecedented CI visibility — allowing you to slice and dice through your GitHub Actions data to identify regressions, pinpoint failures and inspect interesting exemplars to keep your team productive over time.

General

Stacked Diffs Can Be Expensive: Why You Should Do It More

August 30, 2024

Aditya Maru

Everyone is stacking their diffs these days. Read about why there is a sudden up-tick in adoption of this workflow, and how this can actually start costing your organization a lot more...unless you implement some checks and balances.

Announcements

Launch: Workflow Analytics

June 18, 2024

Aayush Shah

Discover Blacksmith’s new workflow analytics offering! Get critical insights into performance, spend, and failure rates across your CI pipelines, simplifying maintenance and optimization. Explore our dashboard's powerful features now!

Latest posts

Engineering

The exodus from GitHub Actions to Buildkite

May 28, 2024

Aditya Jayaprakash

GitHub Actions might cut it for small teams, but as companies scale, BuildKite often emerges as the better choice due to lower CI costs, reliability, enhanced observability, and automated retries.

Announcements

Blacksmith is SOC2 Type 1 compliant

May 6, 2024

Aditya Jayaprakash

Blacksmith is now SOC2 Type 1 compliant, underscoring our commitment to top-tier security practices. Learn about our latest steps to safeguard your data, including pentests, disaster recovery plans, and JIT tokens with Firecracker VMs.

General

What it was like going through YC W24

April 22, 2024

Aditya Jayaprakash

Reflecting on Blacksmith’s transformative journey through YC’s W24 batch, and why aspiring founders should seriously consider applying to YC S24. This detailed recount offers invaluable insights and advice!

Engineering

Push, Cache, Repeat: Amazon ECR as a remote Docker cache for GitHub Actions

April 15, 2024

Aditya Jayaprakash

Explore how using remote cache with AWS ECR can drastically speed up your Docker builds in GitHub Actions, optimizing performance and reducing costs. Learn the setup and see real performance improvements!

Announcements

Launch: Local Docker registry mirrors in Blacksmith

April 9, 2024

Aayush Shah

We at Blacksmith have the privilege of observing patterns in thousands of GitHub Action workflow jobs a day. Docker image pulls are a ubiquitous part of most CI workloads — running service containers for integration tests, pulling dependencies for Docker builds, all pull images from a Docker registry.