GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams

I tend to disagree with this as it seems like an ad for Nix/Buildkite...

If your CI invocations are anything more than running a script or a target on a build tool (make, etc.) where the real build/test steps exist and can be run locally on a dev workstation, you're making the CI system much more complex than it needs to be.

CI jobs should at most provide an environment and configuration (credentials, endpoints, etc.), as a dev would do locally.

This also makes your code CI agnostic - going between systems is fairly trivial as they contain minimal logic, just command invocations.

Ian Duncan, I was imagining you on a stage delivering this as a standup comedy show on Netflix.

My pet peeve with Github Actions was that if I want to do simple things like make a "release", I have to Google for and install packages from internet randos. Yes, it is possible this rando1234 is a founding github employee and it is all safe. But why does something so basic need external JS? packages?

Dead on. GitHub Actions is the worst CI tool I’ve ever used (maybe tied with Jenkins) and Buildkite is the best. Buildkite’s dynamic pipelines (the last item in the post) are so amazingly useful you’ll wonder how you ever did without them. You can do super cool things like have your unit test step spawn a test de-flaking step only if a test fails. Or control test parallelism based on the code changes you’re testing.

All of that on top of a rock-solid system for bringing your own runner pools which lets you use totally different machine types and configurations for each type of CI job.

Highly, highly recommend.

I know this is off topic, but that homepage is a piece of work: https://buildkite.com

I get it's quirky, but I'm at a low energy state and just wanted to know what it does...

Right before I churned out, I happened to click "[E] Exit to classic Buildkite" and get sent to their original homepage: https://buildkite.com/platform/

It just tells you what it Buildkite does! Sure it looks default B2B SaaS, but more importantly it's clear. "The fastest CI platform" instead of some LinkedIn-slop manifesto.

If I want to know why it's fast, I scroll down and learn it scales to lots of build agents and has unlimited parallelism!

And if I wonder if it plays nice with my stack, I scroll and there's logos for a bunch of well known testing frameworks!

And if I want to know if this isn't v0.0001 pre-alpha software by a pre-seed company spending runway on science-fair home pages, this one has social proof that isn't buried in a pseudo-intellectual rant!

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I went down the rabbit hole of what lead to this and it's... interesting to say the least.

https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/nothing-works-until-you-m...

https://www.reddit.com/r/branding/comments/1pi6b8g/nothing_w...

https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1petsis/comment/nsm...

Killing engineer teams? Hyperbole thread titles need to be killed. I find github actions to be just fine. I prefer it to bitbucket and gitlab.