Open-sourcing our commit verification tool, Wilfred

If you’re an engineer, you may be familiar with the “can I deploy?” dance. You want to deploy your commit to production, but you’re not sure if all the other commits waiting to be deployed are ready to go.

So you ask everyone on the team, “Can I deploy?” and keep track of the list until you’re at zero.

“Yes, sorry.” Two to go.

“Yes!” One more.

“Do it” Woo! Commence deployment.

In 2012, with just a few engineers in a single office in San Francisco, it was already repetitive enough that Gumroad alumnus Sidharth Shanker built a solution to let you verify commits on staging before deploying to production: Wilfred.

Today, fully remote with a dozen engineers, it has only gotten more useful. So, we’re open-sourcing it.

On top of the simple queue, Wilfred also connects with Slack to let you know when commits are ready to be verified on staging, and ready to be deployed to production.

All commits have been verified! @sahil, could you please deploy?

No more deploy dances! You can fork it on GitHub. We hope you like it.