• Blog Post Highlights: A blog post about GitHub Actions landed on Hacker news attracting attention. The author was contacted by GitHub Actions' Product Director Ben. They had a good chat and agreed on improving communication. Ben shared the project roadmap with the author.
• Context of Dissatisfaction: The author's team of 15 engineers constantly pushes to the main branch in a monorepo split per module. They use trunk based development and deploy multiple times a day.
• Pull Request and Required Checks Issues: In a monorepo setup, specifying a "required check" based on specific folder names causes problems. If a pull request only changes a different folder, the required check won't run. Workarounds are hacky and difficult to maintain. GitHub should consider requiring all checks to pass before merging instead.
• Reusability and YAML Problems: As pipelines grow, managing them with GitHub Actions becomes difficult. There are issues with if statements, workflow reuse, and the needs clause. Duplicated statements and the need to update them manually lead to errors.
• Lack of Local Development: There is no way to run GitHub Actions locally. The tool act is subpar.
• GitHub's Lack of Care: Many pain points have been open for years with no action taken. Some issues recently closed by GitHub caused a backlash. There are no signs of addressing these issues based on the public roadmap.
• Options Considered: Given the problems and GitHub's lack of motivation, the author would think twice about using GitHub Actions again. Other CI/CD options like Gitlab, Jenkins, TeamCity, and Dagger are worth evaluating.