CI/CD: Your best dev friend… or worst emotional enemy?

At some point, we all wanted just a simple pipeline.
Now it runs 47 steps, deploys to 6 environments, and fails at step 38 with an error that only exists on Friday evening.

GitHub Actions: “Copy-paste this from Stack Overflow, it’ll be fine.”
GitLab CI: “Let’s make everything a YAML block. Especially pain.”
Jenkins: “I’ve seen things. I remember Java 6.”
CircleCI: “Fast. Until it isn’t.”
ArgoCD: “Do you even GitOps, bro?”

Your commit triggers:

  • Lint
  • Tests
  • Container build
  • Deploy to staging
  • Deploy to prod
    Error: ‘resource busy: locked by deploy-helper-12’
    Who is deploy-helper-12 and why does it hate me? Hmmm, is he really trying to help?

Sometimes it feels like CI/CD causes more trouble than it should.

But we’ll fix it. Right after the rollback. And the Slack thread. And…
And the 25-minute re-run that suddenly works for no reason.

What’s the weirdest thing your pipeline has ever done to you?