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Comment by PunchyHamster | Hacker News Reader

And just sheer amount of documentation and examples out there. Everyone uses it, therefore everyone writes about it, the new hire probably knows it, and if they don't they can find it easily.

Then again maybe for stuff like actions and in general CI/CD it's not all that bad, you don't need whole team to know exactly how to write it, you just need to have a person knowing it. and it's generally not all that hard to learn.

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This is why CI should be separate from code repository storage and that should be separate from your collaboration tools. They all can speak git if you want.

> This is why CI should be separate from code repository storage

Maybe, but for any complex project you get stuck with dependencies between various code branches and various CI repo branches anyway, so I’m not sure how much easier it really is to manage that complexity rather than just putting the CI code in your repo so that the CI dependencies are explicit.

It feels like a <game theory> problem (Tragedy of the commons? First mover? I dunno them well enough). It’s probably a mistake for any one company to not pick GitHub, because it’s likely a higher friction distraction from what the actual goals are of the company. But enough companies paying that price ultimately would benefit everyone by fuelling stronger competition.

Maybe a coordination problem? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordination_game

It is a version of the prisoner’s dilemma.

The term you're thinking of is "collective action problem".

> Then again maybe for stuff like actions and in general CI/CD it's not all that bad,

CI/CD on github has the npm problem - a lot of tiny stuff gets wrapped in actions people pull in from all over the place. Github does relatively fast deprecations, so actions need to be rewritten and updated even though there's no need for you - in this context I'd argue if it's not a security issue there's no need. So you end up with a lot of work just keeping the existing actions working - and overall would have less effort if you'd have just written your own actions - but not doing that is one of the selling points for github.

I might be biased as I've been doing complex CI/CD for close to two decades now - but github workflows _very_ quickly show their limits when you start seriously using them.

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