18 posts tagged GCP
Making a Slack bot invite meeting participants to a Google Calendar event. Service accounts cannot add attendees without domain-wide delegation, so the bot authenticates as a real user via an OAuth refresh token and patches the event on that user's calendar copy, with a fallback that never blocks the submission.
A Cloud Run service kept hitting its memory limit at startup. The cause: uv run re-syncs the environment by default, reinstalling the dev dependency group at runtime even though the image was built with --no-dev. The fix is --no-sync (and --no-install-project for better layer caching).
Moving the app off its default *.run.app URL onto a company subdomain with Cloud Run domain mappings: the domain-verification step the runbooks skip, why a zone apex takes A/AAAA records instead of a CNAME, why the cutover order matters when an OIDC audience is involved, and a 502 that looked like a broken deploy but was a TLS cert still propagating.
Adding deadline reminders to a workflow tool: a Cloud Scheduler → Cloud Tasks → worker pipeline, why IAM run.invoker was the wrong lock for a public SSO-gated Cloud Run app, verifying OIDC tokens in-app instead, making retries idempotent, computing Japanese business days without hardcoding holidays, and a Next.js standalone build trap with Google client libraries.
The cloud half of the DB: enabling GCP APIs, choosing the cheapest Cloud SQL tier and why, Private Service Connect with no public IP, serverless VPC egress, and migrating a database you cannot reach from your laptop.
Deploying the still-mock-backed app to Cloud Run gated two ways (Slack SSO at the app layer and an office-IP allowlist) with a standalone container and keyless GitHub Actions via Workload Identity Federation. Plus the cost call between an app-layer IP check and Cloud Armor, and the auth gate that forced collapsing an internal self-fetch.
Parsing a multi-field Slack Workflow form into structured data, appending it to a Google Sheet, posting a review message with an Approve button, and on approval booking a Google Calendar event. Covers form parsing, the Sheets API, Slack interactive buttons, and the Calendar API.
Slack Workflow Builder dropped the outbound webhook action, so a form can no longer call your service directly. Here is how I worked around it by routing form submissions through a private channel that a bot reads, then DMing the requester a computed deadline, all without paying for a third-party connector.
Walking through the cloud, database, framework, and surrounding choices for a small internal tool on GCP. Why Cloud Run instead of GKE, why Postgres instead of NoSQL, why skip Redis, and the rest of the decisions worth thinking through before writing code.
How I added a case archive search feature to an existing Slack support bot - from arguing against a separate service, to skipping FAISS for 600 records, to automating a CMS-to-GCS data pipeline.
Why I switched from Gemini 2.5 Flash to Claude Sonnet on Vertex AI, and how the migration went. Covers the Anthropic Vertex SDK, code changes, type safety, and first impressions.
How I built a Slack Workflow integration that lets users submit raw notes, uses Gemini AI to structure them into proper documentation, and automatically creates GitHub PRs for review.
How I added interactive feedback buttons to collect user satisfaction data, log it to BigQuery, and prevent double-clicking with visual confirmation.
How I fixed the bot serving outdated knowledge after GCS file updates by adding a reload endpoint, OIDC authentication, and wiring up GCS change notifications through Pub/Sub.
Adding structured logging Python Slack bot, stream logs to BigQuery, and visualize usage with Looker Studio dashboards.
Fixing Slack retry duplicates with event deduplication, eliminating Cloud Run cold starts with min-instances, and dealing with cross-region Gemini API latency.
How I added Google Vertex AI Gemini to my Flask Slack bot, with chat sessions, error handling, and troubleshooting permission issues. From zero to working AI in production.
How I deployed a Python Flask app to GCP Cloud Run with GitHub Actions CI/CD, coming from an AWS background. Spoiler: easier than you think.
