If you wanted a better version of GitHub Actions/CI (the orchestrator, the job definition interface, or the programming of scripts to execute inside those jobs), it would presumably need to be more opinionated and have more constraints?
Who here has been thinking about this problem? Have you come up with any interesting ideas? What's the state of the art in this space?
GHA was designed in ~2018. What would it look like if you designed it today, with all we know now?
I've been working for the last 5 years on an alternative called Dagger. Ended up building a company around it.
We started from the ideal state of CI, and set out to build the platform that would support that.
For us this ideal state of CI boils down to 4 things:
- local-first (local execution should be a first-class citizen, with no exception)
- repeatable (the same inputs should yield the same output, with affordances for handling inevitable side effects in an explicit and pragmatic way)
- programmable. my workflows are software. I want all the convenience of a modern software development experience: types, IDE support, a rich system API
, debugging tools, an ecosystem of reusable components, etc.
- observable. I want all the information in one place about everything that happened in my workflow, with good tooling to get the information I need quickly, and interop with the existing observability ecosystem (eg. open telemetry)
So Dagger is our best effort at a CI platform focused on those 4 things.
Sorry if this comes across as a sales pitch. When
you're building solves a problem you're obsessed with, it's hard to discuss the problem without also mentioning the solution that seems the most obvious to you :)
I've been watching Dagger with great interest, although have not moved production workloads to it (nor, admittedly, even committed an afternoon to setting up any workflows/graphs).
Passive comment readers should be aware that ^shykes here cofounded Docker (my gratitude), so it's really worth a look.
Can anyone comment on the ergonomics of Dagger after using it for a while?
I was just looking at the docs earlier this week to consider a migration but got confused by the AI sections...
You're not the only one... At some point last year, we discovered that CI/CD workflows and so-called "AI agent workflows" have a lot in common, and Dagger can in theory be used as an execution engine for both. We attempted to explain this - "great for CI/CD and for Agents!". But the feedback was mostly negative - it came across as confusing and lacking focus. So, we are rolling back this messaging and refocusing on CI/CD again. If you haven't checked our docs in the latest 12 hours, it's worth checking again: you'll see clear signs of this refocusing (although we are not done).
In doubt, I recommend joining our public discord server (https://discord.com/invite/dagger-io) it is basically a support group for CI/CD nerds who believe that a better way is possible, and want to discuss it with like-minded people.
This is a core part of systemantics [0]! People are going to do what they’re going to do, as a manager the most you can do to help is to put people in the right teams and to get distractions out of their way.
It’s a difficult idea to accept but once you accept it, it’s kind of liberating. It follows that hiring and then work-assignments during roadmapping are the two points of highest leverage in making a mutually-successful employee-manager relationship.
The problem you’re solving there is a search problem. You’re trying to discover if the employee’s motivation landscape peaks in any dimensions that align with the roadmap. They can be the most skilled person in the world, but if the peaks don’t overlap, the project will never run smoothly. It also follows that in extreme cases where you have a tenured employee that you want to retain for future work, you should absolutely let them drive and shape the roadmap.
We’ll try everything except for a land value tax, so that we can eventually prove once and for all that LVT is the right thing to do! :)
But actually, it’s good to see movement on the underlying problem (affordability of home ownership). This is The Domestic American Problem of our times, and it deserves to be closer to the center of the Overton window of our politics and policy-making.
Even if we think this step is kind of meaningless, it draws more attention to the problem, which is a good thing.
Can someone please explain to me a practical way to apply the LVT? Vancouver used to have an LVT, it was too low and there was a housing speculation bubble in the early 1900s, since property was appreciating much faster than the tax rate. And if the LVT is too high, then you will have very little new development. This isn't even mentioning how you determine the value of the land.
Denmark has an LVT and copenhagen affordability is... not good.
As far as I can tell, LVT only achieves what it sets out to do if it’s equivalent to market rent.
As in, you never really “own” your land, you’re just renting it from the sovereign. If you can’t make good enough use out of it to afford that rent, you should move on. You can find comments on this thread that make this argument explicitly in terms of “maximizing land use efficiency”.
This was the economic structure of feudalism. It … wasn’t great. Private ownership of land has its own tradeoffs but a few centuries of historical experimentation in both directions has been fairly decisive.
How is that LVT "rent" different from any other traditional property tax being "rent"?
As near as I can tell, it is just a different way of deciding how the property tax burden is levied.
Downtown property gets taxed much more. Un-developed speculation property that doesn't contribute to the community (and derives value from other people's contributions) get taxed at the same rate as nearby developed property.
Property taxes have to be set high enough to fund services: Voters want more services, they pay more property taxes. The policy goal is delivering services the voters want to households and businesses.
LVT is designed to achieve a different policy goal: Maximize the efficiency of land use. So its rates have to be set to achieve that goal and, for example, force grandma to move out of that condo in a newly revitalized downtown so a young tech kid who can pay more & benefit from it more can move in.
LVT is a tax on the value of the land specifically, not a traditional property tax. This encourages development on valuable land that is currently being put to unproductive uses.
For example, if you own a lot in a downtown metro which is a parking lot you pay low property taxes because parking lots have low property values. You are disincentivised to develop it because your property tax would go up. Opposite incentives with a LVT.
I understand that, but what should the actual rate of the LVT be? If the LVT rate is too high, nobody will want to develop that parking lot at all because the taxes outweigh the possible profit. And if they are lower than land appreciation, speculation is encouraged.
FYI, there's a .gov-maintained portal where healthcare companies in the U.S. are legally obliged to publish data breaches. It's an interesting dataset!
This is a suboptimal characterization of this site.
I think it would be less wrong to say this is where covered entities that discover reportable breaches of PHI (whether their own or that of a BA) that trigger the immediate reporting obligation report them.
This is a narrower scope of coverage and shallower depth of epistemic obligation than you implied.
One of my favorite HIPAA stories is about a doctor who utilized his patient list when sending out campaign-related information when he was running for local office. Over 2 decades of schooling and still didn't understand how stupid this was.
Situations like this work as a filter of sorts (If you’re so obsessed with measuring relative status/prestige that you want to reduce me to a job title, we’re probably not going to be friends?).
The fact that you’re neighbors with these people changes things. Maybe it’s a wedge into a Socratic discussion about how work isn’t and has never been your identity, where you come to some new and better mutual understanding.
But yeah it’s challenging. If people are so accustomed to viewing about themselves and others thru the conventional status/hierarchical lens… sometimes they can’t understand that it’s a lens and not reality.
You can often politely dodge probing questions about your employment. When someone, for the purpose of small talk, asks me what I do for a living I just say I'm an exotic dancer or a runway model. It's funny and breaks the ice a little. Then I'll ask them about their watch or something. If they insist "no, really, what do you do for a living??" I'll politely say I work with computers and again try to move on. Very rarely I'll get someone who won't drop it "come on, WHAT COMPANY???" and at that point I know they're really not interested in talking--they just want to stack rank me in terms of importance or salary or whatever and I politely dip.
Sometimes I wonder if our system evolved the discipline of economics as an incredibly expensive intellectual distraction to pacify the petit bourgeois.
We can read Dan Wang and Tyler Cowen and whoever else to educate ourselves on the idea that {interests aligned with the further concentration of capital} are the real reason why we the people of the middle class can’t afford to buy a home, and actually you should be grateful you have antibiotics and shelf-stable, flavorless tomatoes and Instagram Reels. Your forebears were not so lucky!
You can’t afford to buy a home because the current owners vote to restrict new housing through zoning and expensive regulation on construction permitting, so supply is limited in the places you’re trying to live (a higher income region?).
The government also subsidized mortgages for the prior generation to increase asset values and now that time is up. Subsidized demand = inflation
Finally, you likely want a bigger house than your parents had. And most people want it to be in the cooler area, not somewhere in Iowa where schools are great but restaurants and non-remote jobs are lacking
> And most people want it to be in the cooler area, not somewhere in Iowa where schools are great but restaurants and non-remote jobs are lacking
This is a fundamental problem. People in big cities are on average richer. That's not just a US thing. People in a Tier 1 city in China have a substantially higher standard of living than people in lower tier cities. There is a very real hierarchy.[1] City tier is determined by size, not income, but income tracks size.
This is the phenomenon that induces over-concentration. Go to the big city and make your fortune, or at least find enough scraps to keep you alive. That's why US homelessness is a rich city thing.
Figuring out how to make mid-sized cities, at the 0.5M to 1M population level work, is something the US currently is not doing well. Those cities have housing, but not jobs.
Supply and demand doesn’t just work in terms of raw housing supply, but in terms of housing that is “on the market”, which is a critical distinction that economists’ arguments deliberately ignore.
In my parents’ generation, it used to be that if you moved or stopped living in a house, you would sell the house in location A and buy a house in location B. Today this would be considered a critical wealth-building error / faux pas. Widespread absenteee landlordism is a new phenomenon, and the fact that we allow it to exist is a de novo policy decision constructed to inflate property value (similar to the subsidized mortgages you referenced).
The reason housing is so unaffordable in my city is not because there isn’t enough housing for the people who live here, it’s because I (along with countless other professionals) am given a choice between subsidizing the lifestyle of somebody who literally doesn’t live here if I’m living in old housing stock, or I’m subsidizing the unavoidably high cost of developing new property (and the lifestyle of property developers) if I’m living in new housing stock.
If the balance of households renting vs owning were inverted, housing would be more affordable. I agree that subsidized mortgages helped create this beast. But the superset problem is the financialization of housing, that the American dream stopped being about the picket fence and started being about securing a passive income / rent-seeking on that picket fence. There are many policies that contributed to this problem.
No mainstream economists touch this problem because we’ve become a country of rent-seeking. So right-leaning economists will say we just need to relax regulation (read: increase the profit margin of property developers) and liberal economists will say we need more “affordable housing” (read: remove more housing stock from the market, for the benefit of a few lucky souls), while neither addresses the core problem of putting median housing titles in the hands of median people, which was perfectly normal from the 50s-80s, before our current system crystallized.
In our current system, building marginal housing and reducing regulation more benefits capital (the top 1% of asset holders; the property developers and the people who can afford to subsidize their profits), not the people who actually live here.
Emotionally, I agree that the current system sucks. But how exactly do you "[put] median housing titles in the hands of median people"? Government seizure and redistribution of property titles? That's where I always get stuck: criticizing society ills is much easier than proposing concrete, pass-able policy.
"No mainstream economists touch this problem" because it's a damn hard problem without painless solutions.
I mean the problem will solve itself eventually. As wealth continues to centralize and urbanization continues unchecked, the “renter” voting block will eventually be state-level majorities in places like New York and California.
There are plenty of ways for people to “vote themselves” property, whether it happens peacefully or not is a decision of those in power. The spectrum runs from land value tax to punitive landlord taxes, improving tenant rights, squatter rights, and outright seizure.
I don’t know which path we’ll go down, but some step in that direction feels inevitable within the next 60 years.
FWIW, I agree that less ink on a resume is usually a higher signal, and I also find that indicators for “ownership”, social trust, autonomy, and proxies thereof are more valuable than number go up narratives.
But sometimes people feel like they must play this game to get past the pre-interview loop screen; I’ve interviewed plenty of people with number go up narratives who’ve done exceptionally well. It’s challenging to make hard and fast rules!
But I'm not joking about thousands of resumes. I have 2210 resumes in the "reviewed" folder now. And they are _very_ heavy on the "number goes up" signal. I think there might be some spam service that sends them out.
I interviewed several candidates, and they are completely bad. Like, totally. Not being able to write simple recursive graph traversal ("you have a list of jobs with dependencies on each other, walk through them in a topological order"). Some can't even write simple "while" loops.
As a caveat, I’ll say that evaluating a person by resume alone is fundamentally not possible. I’m not trying to evaluate a person, I’m trying to evaluate “should I spend 90 minutes of eng resources giving a first interview to this person”.
So I don’t take the resume at face value, I trust our experience interviews and reference checks to get a truer measure of these features.
That being said, social trust shows up as being repeatedly given informal leadership roles. Including being trusted to design a system, orchestrate implementation, contribute to roadmapping, or work with non-eng people within the company or customers directly. There are other examples, these just came to mind.
Basically I’m looking for symptoms that their coworkers and managers trust them to do their job independently and with high quality. The theory is that you usually (but not always! which is why you actually interview people) earn this trust by being good at this job.
(Note: my views, not my employers’. I actually don’t make these decisions at my company.)
I work at Graphite, our reviewer is embedded into a bigger-scope code review workflow that substitutes for the GH PR Page.
You might want to look at existing products in this space (Cursor's Bugbot, Graphite's Reviewer FKA Diamond, Greptile, Coderabbit etc.). If you sign up for graphite and link a test github repo, you can see what the flow feels like for yourself.
There are many 1000s of engineers who already have an AI reviewer in their workflow. It comments as a bot in the same way dependabot would. I can't share practical lessons, but I can share that I find it to be practically pretty useful in my day-to-day experience.
Heyo, disclosure that I work for graphite, and opinions expressed are my own, etc.
Graphite is a really complicated suite of software with many moving pieces and a couple more levels of abstraction than your typical B2B SaaS.
It would be incredibly challenging for any group of people to build a peer-level Graphite replacement any faster than it took Graphite to build Graphite, no matter what AI assistance you have.
It’s always faster and easier to copy than create(AI or not). There is lot of thought and effort in doing it first, which the second team(to an extent) can skip.
Much respect to what have you have achieved in a short time with graphite.
A lot of B2B SaaS is about tones of integrations to poorly designed and documented enterprise apps or security theatre, compliance, fine grained permissions, a11y, i18n, air gapped deployments or useless features to keep largest customers happy and so on and on.
Graphite (as yet) does not any of these problems - GitHub, Slack and Linear are easy as integrations go, and there is limited features for enterprises in graphite.
Enterprise SaaS is hard to do just for different type of complexity
If you've used Graphite as a customer for any reasonable period of time or as part of a bigger enterprise/org and still think our app's particular integration with GH is easy... I think that's more a testament to the work we've done to hide how hard it is :)
Most of the "hard" problems we're solving (which I'm referencing in my original comment) are not visually present in the CLI or web application. It's actually subtle failure-states or unavailability that you would only see if I'm doing my job poorly.
I'm not talking about just our CLI tool or stacking, to clarify. I'm talking about our whole suite, especially the review page and merge queue.
What kind of enterprise SaaS features do you wish you had in Graphite? (We have multiple orgs with 100s-1,000s of engineers using us today!)
The Graphite review UI/UX is at least 3x better than GitHub, and also somehow loads faster. Same with the customizable PR inbox. Love it! Appreciate your work on the platform!
Who here has been thinking about this problem? Have you come up with any interesting ideas? What's the state of the art in this space?
GHA was designed in ~2018. What would it look like if you designed it today, with all we know now?
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