If you don't want to pay, you'd have to not use GitHub Actions at all, maybe by using their API to test new commits and PRs and mark them as failed or passed.
One problem is that GitHub Actions isn't good. It's not like you're happily paying for some top tier "orchestration". It's there and integrated, which does make it convenient, but any price on this piece of garbage makes switching/self-hosting something to seriously consider.
Github being a single pane of glass for developers with a single login is pretty powerful. Github hosting the runners is also pretty useful, ask anyone who has had to actually manage/scale them what their opinion is about Jenkins is. Being a "Jenkins Farmer" is a thankless job that means a lot of on-call work to fix the build system in the middle of the night at 2am on a Sunday. Paying a small monthly fee is absolutely worth it to rescue the morale of your infra/platform/devops/sre team.
Nothing kills morale faster than wrenching on the unreliable piece of infrastructure everyone hates. Every time I see an alert in slack github is having issues with actions (again) all I think is, "I'm glad that isn't me" and go about my day
I run Jenkins (have done so at multiple jobs) and it's totally fine. Jenkins, like other super customizable systems, is as reliable or crappy as you make it. It's decent out of the box, but if you load it down with a billion plugins and whatnot then yeah it's going to be a nightmare to maintain. It all comes down to whether you've done a good job setting it up, IMO.
Lots of systems are "fine" until they aren't. As you pointed out, Jenkins being super-customizable means it isn't strongly opinionated, and there is plenty of opportunity for a well-meaning developer to add several foot-guns, doing some simple point and click in the GUI. Or the worst case scenario: cleaning up someone elses' Jenkins mess after they leave the company.
Contrast with a declarative system like github actions: "I would like an immutable environment like this, and then perform X actions and send the logs/report back to the centralized single pane of glass in github". Google's "cloud run" product is pretty good in this regard as well. Sure, developers can add foot guns to your GHA/Cloud Run workflow, but since it is inherently git-tracked, you can simply revert those atomically.
I used Jenkins for 5-7 years across several jobs and I don't miss it at all.
Yeah, it seems like a half-assed version of what Jenkins and other tools have been doing for ages. Not that Jenkins is some magical wonderful tool, but I still haven't found a reasonable way to test my actions outside of running them on real Github.
Everyone who has Actions built into their workflow now has to go change it. Microsoft just conned a bunch more people with the same classic tech lock-in strategy they've always pursued, people are right to be pissed. The only learning to take away is never ever use anything from the big tech companies, even if it seems easier or cheaper right now to do so, because they're just waiting for the right moment to try and claw it back from you.
Yep, this mostly works fine (and can be necessary already in some setups anyway), the main issues are that each status update requires an API call (over v3, AFAIK updating statuses was never added to v4) so if you have a lot of statuses and PR traffic you can hit rate limits annoyingly quickly, and github will regularly fail to deliver or forward webhooks (also no ordering guarantees).
We have internal integrations with GitHub webhooks that will hit our server to checkout a branch, run some compute, and then post a comment on the thread. Not sure if you can integrate something like that to help block a PR from being merged like Actions CI checks, but you can receive webhooks and make API calls for free (for now). Would definitely result in some extra overhead to implement outside of Actions for some tasks.
> Not sure if you can integrate something like that to help block a PR from being merged like Actions CI checks
Post statuses, and add rulesets to require those statuses before a PR can be merged. The step after that is to lock out pushing to the branch entirely and perform the integration externally but that has its own challenges.
Why the AI disclosure? Is it just for the author to make sure the readers know they are AI-skeptic and use the opportunity to link to another article, or would there be something wrong with the proof had AI been used to help write the code?
(By help I mean just help, not write an entire sloppy article.)
Hey, I wrote this! There are a couple of reasons that I included the disclosure.
The main one is to set reader expectations that any errors are entirely my own, and that I spent time reviewing the details of the work. The disclosure seemed to me a concise way to do that -- my intention was not any form of anti-AI virtue signaling.
The other reason is that I may use AI for some of my future work, and as a reader, I would prefer a disclosure about that. So I figured if I'm going to disclose using it, I might as well disclose not using it.
I linked to other thoughts on AI just in case others are interested in what I have to say. I don't stand to gain anything from what I write, and I don't even have analytics to tell me more people are viewing it.
All in all, I was just trying to be transparent, and share my work.
Your actor analogy in your other post about AI doesn't really work when it comes to using LLMs for coding, at least. LLMs are pretty good at writing working code, especially given suitable guidance. An actor wouldn't be able fake their way through that.
That's nice to hear. For me personally, I don't really care what tools the author uses to write the article, as long as the author takes responsibility! Yes, that means I'll blame you for everything I see in the article :P
It's like "pesticide use disclosure: our blueberries are 'no spray'; but we are not insinuating there is anything wrong with pesticides."
:)
I like it!
But, here it does serve a purpose beyond hinting at the author's ideological stance.
Nowadays, a lot of readers will wonder how much of your work is AI assisted. Their eyes will be drawn to the AI Use Disclosure, which will answer their question.
The way I understand it, the closer the better for the reasons stated, but that's just a factor and there are others that might make you not want to stay too close for certain logic.
Open source does not mean accepting everyone's work or even accepting contributions at all. From the article, it seemed like this was the major concern.
I found the part that said "yes open source provides transparency but we have a roadmap" a bit weird.
It's their product, so if they don't want to open source it then they shouldn't. No need to write a silly article with almost as many emojis as words.
I don’t want to, but looks like I’ll have to, interest rates being what they are. I really liked the place, made a nice little garden for the first time in my life
But if yall think selling is a good idea, that’s a good omen
Sounds like either you are not in the US and did not have access to fixed rate mortgages, or you are in the US and opted for an adjustable rate mortgage, and somehow missed the unprecedented refinancing opportunities of 2020/2021?
I feel the same. I think it's mostly "impatience" or the fear of losing time. We get older and busier and the "price" we pay to spend hours on a book gets more and more expensive.
Learning is an investment, and as my salary increases and life gets more comfortable, my brain doesn't feel the urge to learn and prefers leisure.
I'm looking for ways to "hack" my brain and get back into the habit of learning in my free time and wanting to figure things out. When I have kids I hope they will be curious and I'll learn with them.
That's super annoying, because while I procrastinate on reading papers or even articles on the things I want to learn (as in, I feel - at least occasionally - motivated and positive about learning), works of fiction, like novels or short stories, can instantly suck me in for days. Somehow, when it comes to fiction, the beancounter in my head just packs up and goes on a leave.
> I'm looking for ways to "hack" my brain and get back into the habit of learning in my free time and wanting to figure things out
Please share anything you've found. For me:
- discovering Obsidian a year ago was a great boon. It led me to comb through millions of words of old person notes, remembering many different me's interest in different topics etc. When approaching a new topic, I now compulsively take detailed notes and then reform them into "evergreen notes" (google this term) although it's not the same effortless joy of my childhood.
- recently refinding old sites like wiki.c2.com has rekindled a great passion. The style of discussions, without marketing, status seeking, linking to blogs, medium articles etc. is also extremely pleasant and lets the content float up much better. Even modern communities which don't suffer from these problems still seem to have jaded userbases, who are just... Tired and not willing to really revel in their knowledge, but protectedly proactively avoid things.
- really calming myself down before engaging, e.g. closing my eyes for 10 mins in quiet, or just doodling on a paper, maybe stacking some 9 volt batteries into a tower and calmly approaching the topic, reading or such. In this way, reading can almost be like a reverse stream of consciousness. However life quickly knocks, taking me out of this (flow?) state. I recall some researchers discussing how children effortlessly play (so the opposite of the original topic about effortful learning...) experimenting, collecting data etc. to learn and develop their worldviews, but if you impose requirements or expectations on them, they learn slower and don't blossom.
I keep curiosity but lowering the bar and raising the reward. I think that's going to be different for everyone, but for me the lowered bar is by making sure I have concrete "wander" time in my day, and the reward is having someome I'm excited to talk to about the topic. The latter gives me the drive to actually use my wander time on stuff that's interesting, not just faff it away on YouTube.
I also make "grab bags" for everything, I am a perpetually disorganized person but this lets me be prepared. I have a drone bag, an electronics box, a bike toolbox, any significant project gets a bag/box I grab on a whim. That way I lower the preparedness bar and boring organization tasks.
If you don't want to pay, you'd have to not use GitHub Actions at all, maybe by using their API to test new commits and PRs and mark them as failed or passed.
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