Posted by codesuki 1 day ago
> But if you’re running a real production system, if you have a monorepo, if your builds take more than five minutes, if you care about supply chain security, if you want to actually own your CI: look at Buildkite.
Goes in line with exactly what I said in 2020 [0] about GitHub vs Self-hosting. Not a big deal for individuals, but for large businesses it's a problem if you can push that critical change when your CI is down every week.
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...
Glad that the classic site hit the mark, but a lot work to do to make that clearer than it is; we're working on the next iteration that will sunset the CLI homepage into an easter egg.
Happy to take more critique, either on the execution or the rabbit hole.
I say that not because we wanted the CLI homepage to be 'legit', the light context there is we needed a way to quickly change direction from a previous failed initiative that added stark category marketing across the classic site... so took the opportunity to do purposefully do something very different from conventions, rightly or wrongly.
You brought up Planetscale's markdown homepage rework in one of those posts and I actually think it's great... but it's also clear, direct, and has no hidden information.
I'd love to see what happens to conversions once you retire this to an Easter Egg.
We'll publish details when we do retire it to show how it performed and the reactions. Something like this thread is great for feedback to contrast against other sources.
Our scenario: relatively simple monorepo, lots of docker, just enough bash, trunk-based dev strategy. It's great for that.
#git --clone [URL]
Once it was updated to latest and all the bad old manually created jobs were removed it was decent.
There are numerous ways to shoot yourself in the foot, though, and everything must be configured properly to get to feature parity with GHA (mail server, plugins, credentials, sso, https, port forwarding, webhooks, GitHub app, ...).
But once those are out of the way, its the most flexible and fastest CI system I have ever used.
Commit with one character YAML difference? Check.
Commit with 2-3 YAML lines just to add the right logging? Check.
Wait 5+ minutes for a YAML diff to propagate through our test pipeline for the nth time today? .. sigh .. check
BUT, after ironing all these things out (and running our own beefy self-hosted runner which is triggered to wake up when there's a test process to snack on), it's .. uh.. not so bad? For now?