Modern CI is too complex and misdirected

I agree with you in principle, but I have learned to accept that this only works for 80% of the functionality. Maybe this works for a simple Diablo or NodeJS project, but in any large production system there is a gray area of “messy shit” you need, and a CI system being able to cater to these problems is a good thing.

Dockerizing things is a step in the right direction, at least from the perspective of reproducibility, but what if you are targeting many different OS’es / architectures? At QuasarDB we target Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OSX and all that on ARM architecture as well. Then we need to be able to set up and tear down whole clusters of instances, reproduce certain scenarios, and whatnot.

You can make this stuff easier by writing a lot of supporting code to manage this, including shell scripts, but to make it an integrated part of CI? I think not.

We got tired of using external tools that were not well-aligned with our build/deployment use cases - non-public network environments. GitHub Actions, et. al. cannot touch the target environments that we deploy our software to. Our customers are also extremely wary of anything cloud-based, so we had to find an approach that would work for everyone.

As a result, we have incorporated build & deployment logic into our software as a first-class feature. Our applications know how to go out to source control, grab a specified commit hash, rebuild themselves in a temporary path, and then copy these artifacts back to the working directory. After all of this is completed, our application restarts itself. Effectively, once our application is installed to some customer environment, it is like a self-replicating organism that never needs to be reinstalled from external binary artifacts. This has very important security consequences - we build on the same machine the code will execute on, so there are far fewer middle men who can inject malicious code. Our clients can record all network traffic flowing to the server our software runs on and definitively know 100% of the information which constitutes the latest build of their application.

Our entire solution operates as a single binary executable, so we can get away with some really crazy bullshit that most developers cannot these days. Putting your entire app into a single self-contained binary distribution that runs as a single process on a single machine has extremely understated upsides these days.

The complaint is invalid. CI pipelines are build systems.

Nitpick: I think you meant to write "gong".

I personally love it. RTFM is pretty much the basis of my career. I always at minimum skim the documentation (the entire doc) so I have an index of where to look. It's a great jumping off point for if you do need to google anything.

Books are the same. When learning a new language for example, I get a book that covers the language itself (best practices, common design patterns, etc), not how to write a for loop. It seems to be an incredibly effective way to learn. Most importantly, it cuts down on reading the same information regurgitated over and over across multiple blogs.