GitHub Actions Hero: Nikita Sobolev

Nikita Sobolev (@sobolevn) is a developer with more than a decade of experience, and he got started where many do: at university. He runs wemake.services, a custom development and consulting company, which drives his interest in automation.

We need to have lots of custom tools to help us in the process. We build linters, code-quality tools, and bots to help us.

That need has translated into a portfolio of GitHub Actions covering different parts of the development workflow. His Python Style Guide Action targets code quality before shipping. Meanwhile, restrict-cursing-action works on the human side of collaboration.

It is all about communication. We don’t want to ruin the communication with anyone just by accidentally using any bad words. We also don’t want other people to use strong language in our projects. Open-source should be fun! Luckily, this check can be automated!

His go-to Action, though, is dotenv-linter, a linter for .env files. It addresses a problem that may seem niche but can be costly:

A broken .env file can cause you so much confusion! It is better to double check.

He also maintains docker-image-size-limit, which enforces a maximum size on Docker images, and says more Actions are in the works.

What makes Actions stand out

For Sobolev, the appeal of GitHub Actions starts before a single line of workflow YAML is written. The onboarding is a big part of it:

It literally takes three clicks for an average python / js / etc project to start working with GitHub Actions. All thanks to template project starters. That, by the way, can be easily and fully customized to suit your needs. It is way easier than most of other CIs.

Once a project is running, the GitHub Marketplace becomes the place to find what comes next. Sobolev is a fan of browsing its categories, whether for something specific like deployment or just to see what exists.

He also points to the ecosystem around the platform as a strength, with the developer community contributing tools at a steady clip.

Getting started yourself

The path to building your own Action starts with the Learning Lab course. The GitHub Marketplace is the destination for finding existing Actions to use or extend. In addition, the GitHub Actions Hackathon produced a collection of community-built Actions that are available to fork, clone, use, or contribute to—including a new submission from Sobolev himself.