I picked up a thread on lobste.rs about this, thinking it might be a historical note about Microsoft Bob, but of course it wasn't:

https://bob-cd.github.io

Unfortunately there are so many unexplained buzzwords on that site that I haven't the foggiest idea what it's talking about or whether this new "bob" thing is anything worth looking into.

"CI"? "CD"?

Seems to have something to do with "DevOps", whatever that is.

The site quotes Einstein on the front page:
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."
It seems to me they've gone below that lower limit, and could do with a little more complication in order to explain themselves.

“CI”/“CD” is an empty phrase that is usually used to tell people that your code is compiled on a server instead of your computer.

Buzzwords are not there for you, they're there to appease marketing teams and confuse competing companies making them feel like they're not ahead of the curve.

I've always wondered whether these trends were really organic or not. There definitely are some ideas that are going around and mixing together into something novel and that gets adopted, but these are very different from buzzword trends.

In this case I felt like I needed to learn an API before I could understand their marketing pitch. An API that their target audience presumably already knows. I haven't attended any of the right conferences or trade shows, so I haven't been programmed with the API which would enable me to decode their message.

But I do like the minimalist aesthetic of the site and I'm sympathetic to many of the things they cite as inspirations. So maybe I would like this project too?

Poking around with various websearches I gather that CI/CD has something to do with working as a team of developers. Hence "DevOps". But despite that breadcrumb I still can't penetrate the jargon and understand what exactly it is they're selling. A source-code control system with shared repositories like Git? But from some of the example scripts it looks like they use git as a provider ... And what's going on with those "pipelines"?

Devteams are infamous for always inventing "better" mousetraps when it comes to their own processes. This looks like one of those.

Too bad. I would have enjoyed an article about the failure of Microsoft Bob's user interface.

I think CI/CD is used for automation. Like you can make a script that does an action that you define whenever an action that you define happens.
And DevOps is Developer Operations.

CI in this context is apparently "Continuous Integration", referring to a mechanism by which the members of a software development team can merge (i.e., integrate) their individual work with work done by others. "Continuous" because the mechanism allows the team to build and possibly deploy the product with each new change.

I think CD is "Continuous Deployment".

So, yeah, kinda like a source code control system, but including a build engine and other things. Hosted, as jkl says, on a server.

I'm not sure, but the acronym seems to have been introduced by the Agile community.

Nothing specific to Unix, obviously, and I suppose I should apologize for bringing it up here. I just got annoyed by the cryptic in-group language and how much effort is needed to penetrate it. Failure to define/explain our terms or provide links to background material is fairly common in tech and often obfuscates what turns out to be a rather simple (perhaps even obvious) idea.

One of the things I love most about Unix is that its originators wrote so clearly about what they were doing. I admire Kernighan and Pike, for example, as much for their writing skills as for their programming chops.

You already worked out what CI/CD is an abbreviation for, so I won't repeat it.

When someone says CI, usually they mean "whatever is responsible for running tests on each pull request". The Wikipedia page for CI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration says a bunch of stuff but none of that is what people actually mean when they say CI, people really just mean something on a server somewhere runs something on your code when you push it.

Someone, somewhere, is probably talking about "CI" on their never-integrated long-lived feature branch which isn't continuously integrated with anything.

The "CD" part of CI/CD is horrific - the fact that it can mean either continuous deployment or delivery, which allegedly have distinct meanings (can never remember which is which), is terrible.

A real failure of terminology.

(29-12-2022, 01:21 AM)pizzaroll1 Wrote: A real failure of terminology.

Have you heard the word “serverless” yet?

(29-12-2022, 05:54 AM)jkl Wrote:

(29-12-2022, 01:21 AM)pizzaroll1 Wrote: A real failure of terminology.

Have you heard the word “serverless” yet?

Oh god, I've heard of it somewhere and I'm scared to even think what that might mean.

Since only fuddy-duddies like me are interested in old-fashioned desktop software making no use whatsoever of a network connection, I doubt that's what they mean by "serverless".

If I had to guess, I'd say it's probably a mesh of collaborating microservices, perhaps with no established central coordinator. Close?

Quite close. “Serverless” roughly equals “having an uncertain number of unknown servers”.

https://thenewstack.io/serverless-archit...n-patterns

Reading this stuff makes me realize how much the industry has passed me by. As someone who's mostly into home computing rather than web, mobile, or enterprise I don't have much need or interest in a lot of the related technologies.