Part one of an N part series: The motivation behind trying to build my own CI system & why now. (Part two)
Three and a half years have gone by since I wrote my first post here on dev.to: Why I wrote a Password Manager and what I've learned and a lot has changed since then. I've learned new skills, met new people and even moved to a new country! So I can even say that I have learned not only new programming languages but a new spoken one too!
Yet during all of this time and through all of these changes, one thing has remained consistent and stayed the same: my laptop. Nearly 8.5 years old now, my machine is definitely starting to feel the effects of Moore's Law however...
But still this machine just keeps on going. It keeps processing and compiling and taking on whatever little software projects I throw at it all in stride without so much as a single complaint (Ignoring one dead & replaced SSD!)
That was until recently however when the power jack stopped working and I thought is this it, the end?.. Will I at last have to replace you and say farewell?
Well I can happily write, on the afflicted laptop, that thanks to a bit of luck & some DIY repairs, we're going to stay together for a little while longer!
That is at least until Microsoft ends support for Windows 10 in 2025... By which point I should accept that our time together is over & that my trusty machine will probably become a file server/backup machine or something else...
Which got me thinking: what am I going to do when the day eventually does come that we say farewell to one another? When I finally buy myself a shiny new machine to catch up with the latest tech?
One thing I know for certain is that I don't want to create more pain than is absolutely necessary recreating my environment... Maintaining/deciphering READMEs & the toolchains they describe sucks, and these last few years I've tried to combat this in both my professional & personal work by leaning heavily into the concept of "dev-env as code" thanks to the ability to run Visual Studio code connected to a docker container/stack of containers: example...
And honestly? I've found this approach very useful... I can destroy/swap between projects easily - so why not try to learn and push ourselves a little further?
I have an old Android app & an old laptop both from that original article 3.5 years ago, but today I have stronger docker & jenkins knowledge + a NAS server that can run containers...
Let's build ourselves a dockerised CI/CD system
Part two coming soon...
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