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Shipmate.
Zero-config deployment — from git push to production in under ninety seconds.
Year
2023
Role
Creator
Timeline
4 months
Status
In production
Stack
01 — Overview
Shipmate is a deployment CLI that takes a repository from git push to a running, monitored production workload with no YAML, no pipeline babysitting and no platform-team ticket. Three commands, ninety seconds, done.
02 — The challenge
Small teams drown in deployment ceremony: Dockerfiles, Helm charts, CI pipelines and a platform wiki nobody maintains. The tax is highest exactly where teams are smallest — and most of it is repeated boilerplate for the same five app shapes.
03 — Approach
- Wrote convention-over-configuration detectors that identify app shape — Next.js, Go service, worker — from the repo itself
- Generated hardened Docker builds and Kubernetes manifests behind a single `shipmate up`, overridable only where needed
- Built progressive rollout with automatic health-gated rollback into the CLI, so bad deploys die in ninety seconds too
- Kept the entire tool stateless — Shipmate deploys into your cloud, holds none of your infrastructure, and costs nothing monthly
04 — The outcome
Twelve thousand installs later, Shipmate deploys everything from side projects to production services. The median first-deploy time for a new user is 84 seconds — I keep the number on the README because it still makes me smile.