Field note · November 1, 2026
Field note: the new site is live on a staging address
Thirty-seven pages, fifty-seven redirects, three failed deploys, one line in a trust policy. What happened this week and what it taught us.
What changed. The rebuilt hackingtheworkforce.org went live on a staging hostname. Thirty-seven pages generated from fifteen wireframe boards and twenty-two hand-written sources, every old URL mapped to a new one, the whole thing publishing from the repository in about three minutes.
What broke. The infrastructure stack failed twice before it created (an identity provider that already existed, and a certificate option that must be omitted when DNS lives elsewhere). Then the publishing job was refused by the cloud three runs in a row. The sign-in audit log showed the cause in one line: the code host had changed the format of its identity token, and our trust policy matched only the old shape. One wildcard fixed it. Then the last step of the publish failed because the role could create a cache refresh but not read whether it had finished; we stopped waiting.
What it taught us. Read the audit log before guessing. Make the build refuse to publish a page with placeholder text, because under deadline you will miss one. And keep infrastructure in a template so a fix is a line in a file, not a memory of a console click.
What is next. Connecting the forms, then moving the real domain, then turning this week’s work into a kit a student can run for another nonprofit.