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Git Submodules Deep Dive for Platform Engineering

Platform engineering teams face a recurring challenge: shared code. You have a library of Terraform modules that ten product teams consume, a set of Ansible roles that every configuration management pipeline needs, or a collection of CI/CD workflow templates that must stay consistent across dozens of repositories. The naive solution is to copy files between repositories, but then every fix requires propagating changes to every consumer by hand. Git submodules offer a structured alternative: embed one Git repository inside another as a tracked dependency with an explicit, auditable version reference.

This post covers how submodules work at the Git level, how to add and consume them, the day-to-day operations that platform engineers and DevOps practitioners need to know, CI/CD automation with GitHub Actions, and the common pitfalls that cause teams to abandon submodules prematurely.

Git submodules mental model: the parent repository stores a gitlink commit pointer, not the submodule's files. Git submodules mental model: the parent repository stores a gitlink commit pointer, not the submodule's files.

Lost in Shades of "I'm Okay"

This piece contains discussion of depression and hopelessness. Please read with care.

There is a particular meanness to depression.

It doesn't always arrive like a storm. More often it comes like summer heat: slow, saturating, difficult to argue with. It settles into the walls, into the body, into the space between one thought and the next, until everything feels heavy with it. The house seems to take it in. Even the light looks tired by the time it reaches the room.

I have known days when the floor felt like the safest place to keep my eyes. Old wood, scarred and splitting, honest in its damage. Floorboards don't ask anything of you. They don't expect performance. They don't require you to explain why lifting your head feels like lifting stone. Looking down became a kind of prayer then, if prayer can be made out of exhaustion. I studied every crooked crack as if it might tell me how to stay in one piece. Lost in shades of "I'm okay."

Shadow of the Cloud

Copyright

Lyrics: © 2025 J. Ryan Johnson. All rights reserved.

Audio Disclaimer

Lyrics: Original | Audio: AI-Generated

I’m a musician, but not a vocalist. I use AI to bridge that gap, turning my lyrics into concept demos that capture their intended style.

These tracks allow artists and agents to hear the full potential of my songwriting exactly as I’ve always heard it in my head.

Oh My Zsh on macOS: A Reference for a Clean, Maintainable Shell

% omz version
             __                                     __
      ____  / /_     ____ ___  __  __   ____  _____/ /_
     / __ \/ __ \   / __ `__ \/ / / /  /_  / / ___/ __ \
    / /_/ / / / /  / / / / / / /_/ /    / /_(__  ) / / /
    \____/_/ /_/  /_/ /_/ /_/\__, /    /___/____/_/ /_/
                            /____/

    master (061f773)

If you spend a large part of your day in a terminal, your shell stops being just a shell and starts becoming part of your development environment. On my Mac, that environment is built around Zsh, Oh My Zsh, the Spaceship prompt, and a small set of plugins that improve the things I do constantly: Git, GitHub, containers, Kubernetes, Terraform, Python, Go, and Ansible. The result is not flashy for the sake of being flashy. It is a shell that surfaces useful context quickly, stays out of the way when I am focused, and is still simple enough to maintain without turning ~/.zshrc into a junk drawer.