Jenkins

There’s a developer that is a massive fan of Jenkins. I’ve never used Jenkins, but he wrote a large post about why he insisted his team migrate to it, and I didn’t understand any of it.

I found it interesting that at first he mentions moving away from AWS CodeBuild because it wasn’t clear if builds were passing or not. I don’t know how this was a problem. The builds are linked to Pull Requests and GitHub displays this clearly.

What I found more interesting is that later on, he then says that GitHub Actions is in its infancy so isn’t as powerful as Jenkins. Sure, but why were you using both CodeBuild and GitHub Actions?

Further to this, one of his advantages of using Jenkins was “Don’t have to pay for GitHub Actions”. Hang on, but you have to pay for a build sever to run Jenkins. How does that even make sense? He was running it on AWS, so was paying Amazon for a dedicated server anyway. I’m pretty sure CodeBuild and GitHub Actions are cheaper to run than a server.

He further justifies using Jenkins with the “everyone else is doing it” line. I’m not even sure if he can verify this claim, but he said “if you look at the big ,key players in the market you will ALWAYS find they have a Jenkins instance”.

He also mentions another team used to use it. Yes that is right “used to use”. Which team was it? The one he used to be in. It was his implementation, and as soon as he switched teams, his old team had binned Jenkins.

I do wish people would use facts in their proposals rather than chatting nonsense to suit their own agenda.