GitHub Actions Feels Bad

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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...

[@fasterthanlime]

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.

[@carel_dfx]

I need a second watch to digest everything you said. _To much complexity for my simple mind, wooohhhhh 🥴🥴🥴🥴🥴🥴🥴_

[@zyansheep]

Can u turn on timed comments? I like writing comments with timestamps :)

[@Microphunktv-jb3kj]

"we found that out in 2001" pretty sure u werenty even born in 2001, how young you look zoomer :D

[@kelsey_roy]

What’s a better alternative to GitHub actions?

[@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

[@efeyzee]

Gender is a scam by big container to sell more Alpines 😤

[@TheSwanies]

to be fair, as a software developer, "alpine or not alpine" almost feels like the universal denominator

[@BryanChance]

Agreed! Very experienced....

[@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)

[@SRG-Learn-Code]

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

[@DaVince21]

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.

[@MeranoFox]

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

[@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

[@adizzx12]

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

[@KevinJDildonik]

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.

[@catsupchutney]

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.

[@flying-sheep]

“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.

[@blarghblargh]

@@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.

[@aleksandermirowsky7988]

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!

[@matmair1915]

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

[@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.

[@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.

[@varshard0]

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.

[@samfundev]

"Sometimes I disable Copilot just to feel something."

[@tymscar]

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!

[@ryanshea5221]

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

[@stephenreaves3205]

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

[@clo4]

YOOO YOU’RE BACK! I loved this video, this is so chaotic in all the right ways

[@james-cucumber]

This was a fantastic video! And it’s awesome that you’ve done subtitles too!

[@emmavdev]

Missed these videos! Glad you're back

[@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.

[@JamesBalazs]

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.

[@dcbroad3]

Did a double take when I saw "Factorio" Hey there John the cooling fan. -ilbJanissary

[@dcnick3]

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.

[@TehGettinq]

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.

[@reed6514]

If you can ping a url, you can run a git pull when it pings.

[@jeiang]

The end with the Jazz Emu was beautiful 🤌

[@JadeBilkey]

I was not expecting the Jazz Emu cover at the end, but it had me vibing.

[@_colonial_]

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. 🥴

[@lucrativelepton]

Dude same, I was borrowing my friends Mac just to figure out what I needed to tweak to get the xcode config files happy

[@ade5324]

You're such a good story teller! happy holidays 🥳

[@ch1n3du3]

I'm so happy you're back, your videos are always worth the wait

[@0xCAFEF00D]

2:55 I don't look at this literal mountain of code and think "Ah, yes, Quality."

[@dingalong14]

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

[@dr-maybe]

Great video! Amazing work on the editing.

[@luuc]

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

[@edgeeffect]

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

[@kristofferbakkejord165]

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.

[@UncleWalter1]

I love the Jazz Emu song at the end. Great video as always!

[@internetrush]

Absolutely love your content nice touches with the game show transitions!

[@uwumarie]

I'm so happy you're back. Hope you are doing well!

[@ApocalypeX]

bluds back 😳

[@PaulFisher]

What an excellent Festivus rant. It made me go back and read your stuff about Go, which also befits the holiday.

[@chiragjn101]

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!

[@epos529]

Good christmas gift, welcome back!

[@BryanSeigneur0]

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.

[@AdamChalmers]

This is awesome. Way more in-depth than other GitHub Actions critiques I've read.

[@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.

[@vanweapon]

Welcome back, Merry Christmas :)

[@DirkJonker86]

Wow, this is really good, it also makes me wish you will one day do a complete history of (personal) computing!

[@zauce1000]

“Sometimes I disable copilot just to feel something” 😂😂😂 I can’t do it… I’m not… strong enough

[@BenjaminWheeler0510]

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

[@2khz]

Fantastic, S tier video as usual, Amos :) Nothing puts a smile on my face more than seeing a new upload.

[@raj-hawaldar]

Great Content! Subscribed!!

[@yairmorgenstern416]

The amount of work that went into making this is *mind boggling*

[@metropolis10]

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.

Not sure I would've done what I did last week if I had watched this. Great video!

[@420_gunna]

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

[@gorenbk]

Well, a new video from you absolutely feels good.

[@rudyorre]

Github actions always felt a little finicky but never knew all this. well-made video!

[@capsey_]

I wasn't expecting that JazzEmu cover, but I'm plesantly surprised lol

[@jonas__784]

Welcome back, I hope you are well!

[@defenestrated23]

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

[@earlylate3308]

Hi Amos, very entertaining video! Just a small point: I feel like the music is sometimes too loud

[@user-bb4km1uj3o]

that hit different 'I disable GitHub Copilot to feel something..'

[@NickAc]

This is hilarious! I love it. Keep up the good work

[@ThePapanoob]

This is an amazing video thank you! I was rolling on the floor

[@Almanildo]

I was _not_ expecting to see an amazing a capella cover of Jazz Emu in this video!

[@theycallmeken]

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 👍🏾

[@JBBell]

Absolute masterclass of informative and entertaining video documentary. Most importantly I feel so validated in my burning hatred for GitHub Actions, as a DevOps guy coming from the Ops side who doesn't fully grok all the niceties outlined within.

[@mrmarker98]

welcome back!!

[@JustAnotherLight]

great video! thanks

[@andybrychenko]

Damn... The quality of the video is amazing!

[@ToukiMS]

The docker joke at 19:46 made me joke way more than what it should have... 😅 Thank you for this excellent moment.

[@Shywizz]

He's alive, im happy

[@elina6969]

My favorite part of GH Actions is that OSS projects can run CI without needing to pay

[@user-jw2kc8ip5q]

"Sometimes I disable Copilot just to feel something" had me laughing so hard!

[@andriidovzhenko6583]

that was just great! thank you!

[@catsupchutney]

Winston Royce's 1969 presentation pans waterfall, and promoted something like agile, but no C-Suite executives bothered to read his paper in depth.

[@cheebadigga4092]

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!

[@spicybaguette7706]

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?

[@Whatthetrash]

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! :)

[@fasterthanlime]

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!

[@ivolol]

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

[@SandileKeswa]

This is really good. I'm a longtime reader of yours, and it looks like I'll be a longtime watcher too.

[@fasterthanlime]

I’m glad you enjoyed it, thanks for the kind words!

[@LDVSoft]

Niiice to meet you again!

[@woodpecker-ci]

Thanks ❤for recognizing us :) 24:37

[@glyph_official]

Liked the whole video but stood up and started applauding when the jazz emu cover started playing

[@yungifez]

This was an absolute banger of a video

[@quaternaryyy]

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

[@ahuggingsam]

omg this video made me feel so seen. thank you Amos

[@gerooq]

so glad you're back man, fucking missed ya

[@randomsde4390]

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.

[@VictorCaldo]

Oh wow this video is fantastic. I will devour your content from now on. I love your energy man!

[@narigoncs]

Welcome back Amos 💖

[@Danielo515]

Now all makes sense

[@drprdcts]

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 :')

[@GoatCS]

Dude that was so good.

[@at0mly]

I worked at a pretty well known company (valued in the billions) that moved all of their pipeline into GitHub actions but they were too cheap to pay for anything so we had to build all of our tools as "open source" even though they were useless to almost anybody else, just to get around licensing.

[@AnindoSarker]

Really good content. didn't understand a lot of the talk because of my lack of knowledge I guess

[@hydejel3647]

Amazing video!

[@nclt1978]

I'm in love :D :D :D Please don't stop.

[@nerya4197]

i was sold on your channel from the internet video but AYO WAS THAT JAZZ EMU !!!

[@Daelon_Suzuka]

fasterthanlime/JazzEmu crossover was NOT on my 2023 bingo list!

[@torphedo6286]

Elwood Deadlock mentioned??? thanks for using tracker music it goes hard

[@mdski95]

Wow. I have always had an intuitive fleeting feeling GHA's bad but I never gave it any proper "system-2" thonk time. thx for affirming my autonomous compass! 😂

[@FuzzyLitchi]

yay new fasterthanlime!

[@igibek]

Thanks for citing our paper :)

[@fasterthanlime]

Thanks for your work!!

[@aljaxus2190]

This video just made me appreciate Gitlab CI even more.