skimmed.

preface: I do not like Microsoft or GitHub

a lot of the points I read seem like skill issue

there is validation for the yaml files, some of the criticism is correct. on occasion the error system in actions does not spit anything useful, you cannot dry run them even if you have self hosted runners

but to say it's killing your engineering team when it's just vibes at my work seems odd, your bad CI is killing your team maybe, but GitHub actions is not the problem

I mean, sure... But for most users of GitHub actions "it's easy and free" is a huge benefit, easily outweighing any technical advantages Buildkite might have.

I'm not sue who Ian Duncan is but i bet they sell or are in the business of developer tools. They always think their better solution is necessary rather than the enemy of having something is wat better than nothing.

Get off github but action on if it keeps your core compiling and your tests run!

Yeah, I always plead for as much as possible to be automated offline. Ideally, I'd like the CI/CD job to trigger just one command, which is what you'd trigger offline as well.

In practice, that doesn't always work out. Because the runners aren't insanely beefy, you need to split up your tasks into multiple jobs, so that they can be put onto multiple runners.
And that means you need to trigger multiple partial commands and need additional logic in the CI/CD to download any previous artifacts and upload the results.
It also means you can restart intermediate jobs.

But yeah, I do often wonder whether that's really worth the added complexity...

Lot of complaining for issues that are easily side stepped, but maybe cos I've learnt it all already, but it does fill the article with lots of words.

The byo compute and logs thing is half the rant which has never even been a problem for me in the last 4 years on GH.

Not sure between config and programming? You literally can choose that yourself.

Biggest issue for CI for me is how to get CI secrets locally.. which I don't know a good answer for.

Nix is great but try getting your whole team / org on it...

Well, I'm in that Nix shop category. For example, I run tests for my OSS project using lots of Python versions. There's no need to use a Github Actions matrix for that - Nix does it more efficiently. Doesn't even require containers or VMs. And the whole setup runs exactly the same locally, on Github Actions, or on Garnix. (But Garnix has better Nix caching than other CI runners, so that's what I use.)

Sounds about right.

I'm using GitHub actions at work because this place is extremely dysfunctional, and I can just add GitHub actions without it being a whole "research spike planning meeting impact analysis" six week journey.

I took it from "there are absolutely no checks and Bob broke the environment because he pushed up a change that's just invalid syntax" to... well, I couldn't make it block the build on failures but at least now when Bob breaks it again I can point to the big red X and ask why he merged with an error.

I've the impression that it's moving the problem to another vendor instead of solving it. Not exactly sure how to feel on this topic.

I agree with everything he said, but I'm currently living in the simple, honest truth of God's own "bash" just like he describes and I'm loving it. Maybe someday I won't. Maybe someday will be soon. Maybe my bash scripts are horrible nightmare fuel. But they're also my children. I love them. Even the ugly ones.

I do indeed "have 800 lines of bash that reimplements job parallelism with wait and PID files, has its own retry logic built on a for loop and sleep, and parses its own output to determine success or failure." I do suspect the script is self-aware. This pleases me. I will bend to its desires. If there comes a time when it no longer desires to perform CI for me, I will respect its wishes.

Yep. Been there done that. Still doing that. Most of these can be worked around. Doesnt make if less annoying, more infact. But still... its fine.

At the very least its version controlled which is more praise than I can give Jenkins at least one out of the box.

TLDR; people are idiots. Dependencies are stealing your data. Write your own CI and stop being a lazy fuck.

Im not sure about the CI solution they are recommending, but I do agree there are some sharp edges to GH Actions. Its not the greatest at logs and had hidden issues all over the place.

My work uses Azure Dev Ops because it's "free", I assume it's effectively just GitHub actions, but without the AI (because no one has updated it in the last 5 years)?

If so, I can agree the agents are awful.