LornaJane

Welcome! I’m Lorna: open source technology leader and developer experience engineer. I’m a striking combination of technical experience, communication skills, and a genuine love for enabling others to succeed. I’m a leader, an engineer, a writer, a user champion, an open source maintainer, and a public speaker. My passion is taking great technology, and making it a great experience for users.

On this site you’ll find my blog, links to things I’ve done in other places, and my contact details. I’m always happy to hear from others in the industry and you are welcome to reach out to me with requests for articles, podcasts, or speaking – I can’t do everything, but that doesn’t stop me trying!

From The Blog

07 Jan

2025

Run GitHub Actions on Subdirectories

I come across a lot of “greedy” GitHub Actions, where automation is running across a whole project instead of only on the parts that are relevant. Examples might be code linters that report problems with documentation folders, or the inverse of that. It’s especially problematic in monorepos where we probably want to use the same tool when we’re doing the same task for different subfolders, but that tool might not make sense to run everywhere. Continue reading →

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12 Dec

2024

OpenAPI Overlays to avoid API oversharing

Most APIs aren’t perfect. By design they are long-lived and may serve many audiences. I see a lot of organisations maintaining multiple versions of APIs, or simply not documenting some of the endpoints to avoid them being included in the published documentation and confusing users. The problem of API redaction is a real one in most organisations, and it goes unsolved or is solved in a way that causes ongoing friction. I’ve helped a few API projects to solve this problem with the new OpenAPI Overlay specification so I thought I’d share! Continue reading →

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25 Nov

2024

Use multi-line values in GitHub Actions

I created an action that needed a rich Markdown value in it, because it’s our weekly meeting agenda template which is formatted for humans with links and paragraphs and things. The Action syntax produced errors when trying to add the content directly to the action, but I got it to work by putting the content into the file, and using the file contents as an environment variable. That’s really the punchline of this post, but read on if you would like more details and some examples. Continue reading →

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