seeknay

Identity and Collaboration Architect

Antipatterns — seeknay.com

Things not to do in this repo, with the reasoning. Grounded in how this specific Jekyll + Minimal Mistakes (remote theme) + GitHub Pages site is built.

Security & privacy (PUBLIC repo)

  • ❌ Don’t commit secrets — API keys, tokens, passwords, .env files. Git history is public and permanent; rotating a leaked key is the only fix.
  • ❌ Don’t commit private PII — keep email: blank in _config.yml; don’t paste personal email/phone/address into posts or config. Use the contact options already on the site.
  • ❌ Don’t paste employer-confidential or client material into posts. Generalize examples.
  • ✅ The GA4 ID and public social handles are fine to commit — they’re meant to be public.

Theme & build

  • ❌ Don’t edit _site/ — it’s generated output (gitignored). Edit sources, then rebuild.
  • ❌ Don’t try to edit the Minimal Mistakes theme files — they’re loaded remotely. To change one, create a local file at the same path to override it.
  • ❌ Don’t add a plugin and expect it to run on GitHub Pages unless it’s on the Pages whitelist. Non-whitelisted gems are silently ignored on the live build.
  • ❌ Don’t reintroduce jekyll-algolia — it’s not whitelisted, so it does nothing on the live site. Search runs on Lunr (search_provider: lunr).
  • ⚠️ Restart jekyll serve after editing _config.yml — it is not hot-reloaded; changes appear to “not work” otherwise.

Content / front matter

  • ❌ Don’t omit required front matter — every post needs title, date, categories, tags. A missing field breaks listings/SEO and now fails CI.
  • ❌ Don’t flip toc: false back to true blindly — some long posts (e.g. the 2026 IAM job-market post) intentionally use a custom collapsible <details> TOC instead of the theme’s sticky TOC.
  • ❌ Don’t use future or mismatched dates in the filename vs. front matter — Jekyll won’t publish future-dated posts in production until that date.
  • ✅ Keep categories/tags lowercase-hyphenated and consistent with existing taxonomy.

Workflow & repo hygiene

  • ❌ Don’t push directly to master for content changes — master is the deploy branch and is protected. Open a PR so CI (build + HTML-Proofer) runs first. Use the publish-post skill.
  • ❌ Don’t bypass or disable CI to “just ship it” — the build/link checks are the safety net for a site with no staging environment.
  • ❌ Don’t hand-edit assets/social-metrics-style generated files if any are added later by automation.
  • ✅ Let Dependabot PRs update github-pages / gem and Action versions; review and merge them.