Automation on doug.sh

Give Your Coding Agent a Journal

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Journaling 🔗

Coding agents forget what they just did. The session ends, context gets compacted, or you walk away for lunch, and when you come back the agent is ready to try the same fix that failed an hour ago. The usual memory setups (CLAUDE.md, project wikis, and so on) are fine for things that don’t change much, but they don’t capture what’s actually happening in the task you’re working on right now.

Route53 as a Key Value Store, 2026 Edition

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Five Years Later 🔗

Back in 2021 I wrote about using Route53 Private Hosted Zone TXT records as a key-value store for GitHub Actions . The trick is still good in 2026 — Route53 is cheap, durable, globally replicated, and you almost certainly already have an AWS account. I still use it.

But the implementation in that post has aged badly. Two things in particular:

It authenticates with long-lived AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID / AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY repo secrets. In 2026, that’s malpractice. GitHub OIDC for AWS shipped in late 2021 — a few weeks after the original post — and there’s no good reason to keep static AWS keys in a GitHub repo anymore.
The Get action ends with echo "::set-output name=value::$VALUE". That workflow command was deprecated in October 2022 and disabled by default in 2023. The original Get action no longer works on a current ubuntu-latest runner. Embarrassing, but here we are.

There are a few smaller polish items too — fragile quote-stripping with tr, a payload.json file written to disk, no escaping if your value happens to contain a ". Let’s fix all of it.

Using Route53 as a Key Value Store in GitHub Actions

Mon, 13 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

2026 update: a modernized version of this post is here — uses OIDC instead of static AWS keys and fixes the deprecated ::set-output syntax that broke the Get action on current runners.

The Need 🔗

GitHub Actions is great, but one thing it’s missing is a form of persistence, or simple key-value store. Sure, you could persist to a git repo - and that might be the right move, depending on the use case. But, what if you just want to store a string or two that you’ll need later?

Using Composite Actions with GitHub Actions

Sat, 11 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Basics 🔗

When developing new automations it’s best to make each component as modular and reusable as possible. When using GitHub Actions, Composite Actions may be your answer for quick development and reusability.

Composite Actions allow you to execute multiple shell steps by calling the Action. These shell steps can be bash, python, nodejs, or powershell. This functionality can be very powerful when you have logic you often want to reuse.

Take for example, running a small Python script that requires a dependency in an Actions Workflow. You could create a Composite Action that: