Tools: Powerful Github Actions Is Slowly Killing Engineering Teams

I was an early employee at CircleCI. I have used, in anger, nearly every CI system that has ever existed. Jenkins, Travis, CircleCI, Semaphore, Drone, Concourse, Wercker (remember Wercker?), TeamCity, Bamboo, GitLab CI, CodeBuild, and probably a half dozen others I’ve mercifully forgotten. I have mass-tested these systems so that you don’t have to, and I have the scars to show for it, and I am here to tell you: GitHub Actions is not good. It’s not even fine. It has market share because it’s right there in your repo, and that’s about the nicest thing I can say about it.

Buildkite is what CI should feel like. But first, let me tell you what CI should not feel like.

Before I get into it: if you’re a Nix shop, take a look at Garnix. It evaluates your flake, figures out what needs building, and builds it. No YAML. No pipeline configuration. It just looks at your flake.nix and does the right thing. Sometimes the best CI configuration is no CI configuration.

Most shops are not Nix shops. This post is for the rest of you. I’m sorry.

Let me start with the most visceral thing, the thing that will sound like I’m exaggerating but I am not.

Your build fails. You get a red X on your pull request. You click through to see what happened. This is where the ordeal begins.

First you land on the checks summary page, which shows you a list of workflow runs. Maybe one failed. Maybe three failed. You click the one that looks relevant. Now you’re on the workflow run page, which shows you a list of jobs. You click the failed job. Now you’re on the job page, which shows you a list of steps, all collapsed. You click the step that failed. The page hitches. You scroll. There is a pause, a held breath, and then the logs appear, slowly, like a manuscript being revealed one line at a time to a supplicant who has not yet proven worthy.

That’s three or four clicks just to see the error, and every one of them loads a new page with its own loading spinner, and none of them are fast. You are navigating a bureaucracy. You are filling out forms at the DMV of CI.

And then the log viewer itself. I have used every CI system known to man, and the GitHub Actions log viewer is the only one that has crashed my browser. Not once. Repeatedly. Reliably. Open a long build log, try to search for an error, and Chrome will look you in the eye and die. This is the log viewer for the most popular CI system in the world. This is the tool you are expected to use to understand why your build failed. It ca

Source: HackerNews