GitHub Actions Feels Bad
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- čas přidán 6. 07. 2024
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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
• Purple Motion - Second...
Samantha Fox Strip Poker
www.lemon64.com/game/samantha...
Version Management Tools: CVS to BK in the Linux Kernel
flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.o...
CVS, Linus, and us
lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/li...
Wikipedia: Home computer
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_co...
Bryan O’ Sullivan, via Internet Archive, “Why I am no longer working at Mercurial”
web.archive.org/web/200512101...
Richard M. Stallman, “The spirit of the BitKeeper license is the spirit of the whip hand”
marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=1...
Linus Torvalds, “How about doing something about it?”
lwn.net/2002/0425/a/ideology-...
Wikipedia: Diff, 1974
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff
Wikipedia: Concurrent Versions System, 1990
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurr...
The Agile Manifesto: History
agilemanifesto.org/history.html
Wikipedia: Lean software development
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_so...
Wikipedia: Lean manufacturing
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_ma...
Infuse: Fusing Integration Test Management with Change Management
doi.org/10.1109/CMPSAC.1989.6...
Grady Booch, Object Solutions (1996)
www.google.com/books/edition/...
Microsoft acquires GitHub for $7.5B (2018)
news.microsoft.com/announceme...
GitHub Actions: built by you, run by us
github.blog/2018-10-17-action...
Compare and contrast GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines
web.archive.org/web/202312071...
Action-tmate (SSH into running jobs):
github.com/mxschmitt/action-t...
Act (run actions locally):
github.com/nektos/act
GitHub Actions Runner node.js logic:
github.com/actions/runner/blo...
I Want Off Mr Golang’s Wild Ride (2020):
fasterthanli.me/articles/i-wa...
Specify check suite when creating a checkrun:
github.com/orgs/community/dis...
USENIX 2023, ARGUS:
www.usenix.org/conference/use...
Security Hardening for GitHub Actions
docs.github.com/en/actions/se...
Jazz Emu’s “Digital Spool” album on Bandcamp:
jazzemu.bandcamp.com/album/di... - Věda a technologie
To try everything Brilliant has to offer-free-for a full 30 days, visit brilliant.org/fasterthanlime . The first 200 of you will get 20% off Brilliant’s annual premium subscription.
I need a second watch to digest everything you said.
_To much complexity for my simple mind, wooohhhhh 🥴🥴🥴🥴🥴🥴🥴_
Can u turn on timed comments? I like writing comments with timestamps :)
"we found that out in 2001"
pretty sure u werenty even born in 2001, how young you look zoomer :D
What’s a better alternative to GitHub actions?
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
Gender is a scam by big container to sell more Alpines 😤
to be fair, as a software developer, "alpine or not alpine" almost feels like the universal denominator
Agreed! Very experienced....
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)
"Obnoxious tea-sipping noise" tells me you care about captions. Brilliant talk. Thanks for sharing.
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.
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
Sounds about right, I remember once when we've tried to implement some custom action sequence (module) without hosting any custom step in JS/Docker there were bizzare bugs and limitations all over the place. I joked to the team that they must used some intern to do all of that. After deeper investigation and some GH source repo check it turned out true, the whole step sequencing was done all by 1 GH intern and not revised ever after (because #legacy I suppose) :D
Though it's still better than Django, where I've encoutered few bugs with existing tickets that are opened for like 10-15 years
This is basically all software. A meme right now is that making game devs crunch is always bad. But this is spoken by people who've literally never done an engineering project. Engineering isn't LEGO. It doesn't come with a complete set of instructions. It's a journey into the unknown. It's more like The Martian. If someone told you tomorrow, there's a man stranded on Mars, how can he stay alive for like 200 days until we can mount a rescue? Most people wouldn't even know where to begin. That's how programming new projects usually feels. Not sometimes. Usually. Whatever ends up being released is full of hacks and Hail Mary passes. So long as it works.
Then 6 months later someone has a fix a security flaw. And they open up the code. And go Dear God what were these people thinking.
Most of the web and *nix is a result of business decisions or inertia. Just look at the misspelling of "Referer" or Bash's inability to support try / catch / raise nativly. You like long enough, you treat all of this stuff as so much Kleenex to be learnt, used, and discarded in favor of the next new thing.
“don't interpolate things into scripts” has been my #1 rule since many more years than GH actions exist. It's just absolutely insane to design anything like this while SQL has existed for >40 years and SQL injections probably almost as long.
@@KevinJDildonik I've been in this industry 20 years, the last 7 of which have been in game dev. mandatory overtime is bad. quit being a contrarian.
"Sometimes I disable Copilot just to feel something."
That was a completely unexpected but very refreshing format for a tech video. Kudos for the immense editing work.
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!
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.
It's great for running Goreleaser, linting, running unit tests, coverage etc. Idk why they would market it as a "deploy" tool - no large SaaS in their right mind would use Actions as their entire CI/CD imo, the other options like Circle are way more polished.
Did a double take when I saw "Factorio"
Hey there John the cooling fan.
-ilbJanissary
Have been trying to figure out how to use gha for deploying on my own infra, ended up spinning up a kubernetes cluster.
2/10, would not recommend.
You can use an action to ssh into whatever server and run whatever command. Dont know if that helps or if thats fine for your scenario.
If you can ping a url, you can run a git pull when it pings.
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
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.
I would love to see you compare GitHub Actions and Gitlab CI
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.
Gitlab CI/CD felt more mature from the beginning. I was shocked when I learned that GH Action doesn't have a built-in feature that allows users to restart a step manually unlike Gitlab.
The end with the Jazz Emu was beautiful 🤌
2:55
I don't look at this literal mountain of code and think "Ah, yes, Quality."
bluds back 😳
Wow, this was such a fantastic video. I have noticed a couple of those things myself, when I went down a rabbit hole after having to download a 50gb image one day for gha. Welcome back Amos!
Love the format. Informational and interesting with a unique take that echoes some of what I've felt in the back of my head since I first used it
YOOO YOU’RE BACK! I loved this video, this is so chaotic in all the right ways
I was not expecting the Jazz Emu cover at the end, but it had me vibing.
Missed these videos! Glad you're back
“Sometimes I disable copilot just to feel something” 😂😂😂
I can’t do it… I’m not… strong enough
This was a fantastic video! And it’s awesome that you’ve done subtitles too!
I have found 1 (one) use for Actions outside of "idk build and test on every push" - compiling Rust for macOS.
After spending hours trying to get various flavors of cross-compilation to work for a project of mine, I threw my hands in the air and bashed out a workflow that just compiled it on `macos-latest` and spat out the resulting binary. 🥴
Dude same, I was borrowing my friends Mac just to figure out what I needed to tweak to get the xcode config files happy
You're such a good story teller!
happy holidays 🥳
Lovely video, some of which has gone over my head, as I have been fortunate enough to be spared from having to work with some of these tools thus far.
Also, I did a double-take at the credits -- was not expecting to hear a Jazz Emu song here, lol
Thanks for taking the time to create this video. Doing something less than trivial in GHA makes me long for something better. Hope a viable contestant will come soon.
"A Completely Unsolicited (And Frankly Quite Rude) Review" -- Superb!!! There needs to be more of this in the world!
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.
Great video! Amazing work on the editing.
I'm so happy you're back, your videos are always worth the wait
I'm so happy you're back. Hope you are doing well!
Awesome video, I recognize a lot of these annoyances even when just trying to put workflows together in github actions. Didn't know they didn't perceive themselves as a package manager / AIO solution tho
Absolutely love your content nice touches with the game show transitions!
Wow, this is really good, it also makes me wish you will one day do a complete history of (personal) computing!
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!
Fantastic, S tier video as usual, Amos :)
Nothing puts a smile on my face more than seeing a new upload.
I love the Jazz Emu song at the end. Great video as always!
What an excellent Festivus rant. It made me go back and read your stuff about Go, which also befits the holiday.
Great Content! Subscribed!!
Good christmas gift, welcome back!
Great video, subscribed!! I am amazed at how jank GH actions are. Thanks for showing some code snippets. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, considering it's a MS product XD
Hey, it's probably a bit odd, but do you upload your music anywhere ? I had the end credit song stuck in my head for the past couple of days.
This is awesome. Way more in-depth than other GitHub Actions critiques I've read.
Quality content as usual. Passionate and interesting and dense. And quite a pleasurably memorable and long awaited encore to your absolutely banging Ode to Joy in the Deutsch.
The amount of work that went into making this is *mind boggling*
I hope one day in the future I'll rewatch this video and will be able to understand all of the witty jokes that I'm too junior to understand now :')
what an incredible amount of effort to put into ... a video essay about github actions.
Hi Amos, very entertaining video! Just a small point: I feel like the music is sometimes too loud
Welcome back, Merry Christmas :)
"Sometimes I disable Copilot just to feel something" had me laughing so hard!
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.
great video! thanks
Not sure I would've done what I did last week if I had watched this. Great video!
that hit different 'I disable GitHub Copilot to feel something..'
hey, does anybody know how his font is called? I'd like to try it
iosevka
sourcehut is selfhostable? or do you not mean setting up your own infra for the polycule
Yup, you can self-host the entire thing, or parts of it.
This is hilarious! I love it. Keep up the good work
I wasn't expecting that JazzEmu cover, but I'm plesantly surprised lol
welcome back!!
music is a bit loud (at least on the beginning where I am at), it makes it a little hard to follow the dialogue for me. Don't know if it's on purpose.
Well, a new video from you absolutely feels good.
"there is no ethical software development under capitalism" reminded me of something i heard Nick Mullen say this week. "the only ethical way to participate in American culture is the opioid crisis"
This is an amazing video thank you! I was rolling on the floor
He's alive, im happy
12:25 - it still blows my mind that we have collectively decided the path of lesser resistance is adding ISA instructions for fast casting of float to int, vs adding actual integers to JS
Github actions always felt a little finicky but never knew all this. well-made video!
Dude ... after having spent 12+ hours of my Sunday attempting to create a GitHub Action that would both enumerate AND sync my forked repos ... I felt this video to very core of my soul 😂 What a much needed catharsis 👍🏾
Winston Royce's 1969 presentation pans waterfall, and promoted something like agile, but no C-Suite executives bothered to read his paper in depth.
Pipe cat into grep. Oh boy I smell JavaScript engineers
that was just great! thank you!
Welcome back, I hope you are well!
I was _not_ expecting to see an amazing a capella cover of Jazz Emu in this video!
Great to see this! I didn't follow it completely, but that's the fun, I guess. It forces you to grow. >_<
Great to see you back and hope your jaw and teeth are doing better. Cheers! :)
Yes! Those videos are dense and multilayered on purpose, so you can/should pause them, look stuff up, and watch them again in a few months, to see if more of it makes sense!
You're got a 99.X% understanding of so many concepts in software, and you're great at communicating. I remember your earlier videos on depression and meaningness - it seems from the outside that you've found something worth doing! :P
12:00 To defend the proprietary header: maybe they need it because they need to know the size of the uncompressed file upfront, because you'd have to wait for the whole file to be uploaded to know how large it is?
My impression before watching the video was, "they came after every other CI tool, so I thought it would be the case they'd learn from every other CI tool's mistakes. How bad could it be?"
I'm not quite sure what words to use to answer that question after watching the video
Having to reinstall things on every workflow run is so inconvenient! Wouldn't it be cool if there was some way to start with a particular base container, layer my favorite tools on top and *cache* the resulting container (so the tools don't need to be reinstalled next time), then use it to build and test my- oh, huh, this is just how Docker's supposed to work in an ideal world, isn't it
So what I'm hearing is that we should be building out our workflows so that they could be run by act. Therefore in future if we need to we could run our whole workflows internally instead of relying on github. Because what happens when github actions is down?
Please do another video as soon as GitLab's Step Runner is released (which will take another GItLab version release cycle or two). This was great!
as a sysadmin who do past years advent of code in "bash", this whole topic flew over my head and I only understand 1/10 of it.
Docker, alpine, huge asssss Ubuntu image, that's about it
that outro got me giggling like its christmas, oh right it is.
The docker joke at 19:46 made me joke way more than what it should have... 😅
Thank you for this excellent moment.
This was an absolute banger of a video
My favorite part of GH Actions is that OSS projects can run CI without needing to pay
On the one hand GitHub Actions is advertised as readily runnable on self-hosted custom runners. On the other hand Python interpreters are not supported on ARM64 Linux because "we do not have hosted runners on ubuntu with arm64 architecture", making actions/setup-python not usable on ARM64 Linux.
yay new fasterthanlime!
Damn... The quality of the video is amazing!
11:54 support file larger than 2**32-1 bytes?
Niiice to meet you again!
Thanks for citing our paper :)
Thanks for your work!!
fasterthanlime/JazzEmu crossover was NOT on my 2023 bingo list!
so glad you're back man, fucking missed ya
Amazing video!
Welcome back Amos 💖
Really good content. didn't understand a lot of the talk because of my lack of knowledge I guess
Liked the whole video but stood up and started applauding when the jazz emu cover started playing
As someone who just started learning CI like 4 days ago:
What
Now all makes sense