GitHub Actions Feels Bad

This video was sponsored by Brilliant.

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Contents

00:00 Sponsor disclaimer
00:02 Intro
00:24 Part 1: A Short (And Mostly Wrong) History of Personal Computing
01:37 Part 2: Life before GitHub
05:06 Part 3: The Toyota Way
06:49 Part 4: The Heist
09:11 Sponsored segment
10:17 Part 5: A Completely Unsolicited (And Frankly Quite Rude) Review Of The GitHub Actions Code
13:04 Part 6: GitHub Actions' Identity Crisis
16:22 Part 7: Maybe This Is More Complicated Than We Thought
21:45 Part 8: The Things I Cannot Change
25:29 Thanks

References:

Purple Motion - Second Reality (remastered) by LenweSaralonde

Samantha Fox Strip Poker

Version Management Tools: CVS to BK in the Linux Kernel

CVS, Linus, and us

Wikipedia: Home computer

Bryan O’ Sullivan, via Internet Archive, “Why I am no longer working at Mercurial”

Richard M. Stallman, “The spirit of the BitKeeper license is the spirit of the whip hand”

Linus Torvalds, “How about doing something about it?”

Wikipedia: Diff, 1974

Wikipedia: Concurrent Versions System, 1990

The Agile Manifesto: History

Wikipedia: Lean software development

Wikipedia: Lean manufacturing

Infuse: Fusing Integration Test Management with Change Management

Grady Booch, Object Solutions (1996)

Microsoft acquires GitHub for $7.5B (2018)

GitHub Actions: built by you, run by us

Compare and contrast GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines

Action-tmate (SSH into running jobs):

Act (run actions locally):

I Want Off Mr Golang’s Wild Ride (2020):

Specify check suite when creating a checkrun:

USENIX 2023, ARGUS:

Security Hardening for GitHub Actions

Jazz Emu’s “Digital Spool” album on Bandcamp:

[GunnerSiIva]

The things I learned with this
- Don’t date Github Actions (21:33)
- Alpine Linux is a gender (21:04)
- If you want to do something in GitHub actions that isn’t in the main container, just create another sibling container (20:11)

[casraf]

Man this was a rollercoaster I was not expecting. Lost it at "Alpine or not Alpine, the two genders". Great content, great style, great editing

[SRG-Learn-Code]

"Obnoxious tea-sipping noise" tells me you care about captions. Brilliant talk. Thanks for sharing.

[DaVince]

Welcome back, Amos, and good luck with everything. This video was _extremely_ entertaining and enlightening and I'm kinda glad I've stayed away from GitHub actions now.

[TheducksOrg]

Hi! I’m the Alex Dawson credited for the photo of Linus at @2:15. Thank you so very much for crediting me - I really appreciate it. A friend saw this in your video and alerted me. I still use Linux a bit, and that conference and meeting Linus, Alan Cox, Bdale from Debian, H Peter Anvin, Rasmus Lerdorf, Andrew Tridgewell, Rusty Russell, and many others was an amazing week

[fenkraken]

It’s funny (and horrifying) to think about in the terms of “business decisions”.

Some team’s PM made people crunch this out to an arbitrary date just to “make it to market”. People here not being able to think it through (and probably not having resources necessary for it) and doing it so it “kinda works”. And after it’s released it’s rapidly on its way of becoming de-facto CI standard because you did it in Microsoft.

And now this is your legacy. Damn

[samfundev]

"Sometimes I disable Copilot just to feel something."

[matmair]

This video is just great. The humor, the technical depth and the honest abut realistic criticism. First video I have seen from you - instant subscriber

[aleksandermirowsky]

It's always such a delight to watch your videos. The sheer quality that radiates from them is truly impressive. It's wonderful to have you back again!

[MeranoFox]

That was a completely unexpected but very refreshing format for a tech video. Kudos for the immense editing work.

[JTCF]

For me, the weirdest part about github actions is that they say you can "deploy" your software yet it's only for deploying on other services or in package registeries. I don't think it can make deploying on your personal server easy. And using self-hosted runners is EXTREMELY janky.

I use github actions to easily release my Factorio mods after I make a new release and send a notification in discord that is read by 1 and a half people. I doubt I'll ever use it for some other project.

[InterFelix]

For all the pain Gitlab CI/CD has caused me, this video sure made me glad I chose to go with it instead of GitHub Actions from the start.
Although I know next to nothing about it apart from what I learned from this video.
Still, copying the source for every. single. pipeline I want to use that somebody has already written into my repo sucks ass.

[zauce]

“Sometimes I disable copilot just to feel something” 😂😂😂

I can’t do it… I’m not… strong enough

[chiragjn]

19:05 I knew the answer could not be any of those, because I have this gem of an action in a step at the start of an ad hoc job to delete toolchains and unnecessary SDK and it frees up 15 GB from the ubuntu image (can free up to 31 GB) and that takes about 90s, and I am billed by minutes of runtime, so Github found an infinite money glitch I guess?

Great video, very entertaining!

[stephenreaves]

I would love to see you compare GitHub Actions and Gitlab CI

[shershahdrimighdelih]

about the first part of the video: I have contributed to the linux kernel several times, and the first time I did, it was about a bug in the memblock allocator that only appeared in very specific circumstances. But because the linux kernel still uses the email system, it took months before I finally sent out the patch and was just hoping that someone else would fix it since it was in the list of open issues. Linus is just wrong about the barrier of entry.

The only reason the linux kernel still gets so many newcomers is because GregKH and other maintainers are very welcoming and understanding. But boy do they need a better system. They changed how the email system works last year and now you can no longer send out those emails directly from a web browser because of the setup required, and I haven't contributed since.

[NatePhysicsTutor]

Genuinly funny. I loved some of your deadpan delivery and I think the flow from section 5 on was great. Some of the setup was a bit long for what it was getting at but I loved the care you put into your script. Looking forward to your future videos.

[edgeeffect]

"A Completely Unsolicited (And Frankly Quite Rude) Review" -- Superb!!! There needs to be more of this in the world!

[metropolis]

3:22 Imagine bookstores telling customers that if they volunteer or pay taxes that contribute to libraries, something that potentially reduces the profits of for-profit bookstores, they will not longer be able to purchase books. Insanity. This wasn't saying an employee of the company can't work on a competitor. It's saying an employee of a customer of a tool can't also work on a competitor. Mind boggling insanity.

[vanmanivan]

what an incredible amount of effort to put into ... a video essay about github actions.