No, Really, Bash Is Not Enough: Why Large-Scale CI Needs an Orchestrator
In my previous post, I talked about why GitHub Actions is slowly hollowing out your engineering team, and I mentioned in passing that bash is not a build system. A number of people wrote in to disagree. Some were polite. Some were not. One person suggested I simply didn’t know how to write bash, which, fair, nobody really knows how to write bash1, we just accumulate coping mechanisms and call it expertise. But the most common response was some variant of: “I’ve been running CI with a Makefile and some shell scripts for years. It works fine.” I want to take this seriously, because it deserves to be taken seriously. Then I want to explain why it stops being true, and who this conversation is actually for. A Note on Audience I write for teams at a certain level of organizational…
