Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

At my work I've noticed another contributing factor: tools/systems that devs need to interact with at some point, but otherwise provide little perceived value to learn day-to-day.

Example is build system and CI configuration. We absolutely need these but devs don't think they should be expected to deal with them day to day. CI is perceived as a system that should be "set and forget", like yeah we need it but really I have to learn all this just to build the app? Devs expect it to "just work" and if there are complexities then another team (AKA my role) deals with that. As a result, any time devs interact with the system, there's a high motivation to copy from the last working setup and move on with their day to the "real" work.

The best solution I see is meet the devs halfway. Provide them with tooling that is appropriate simple/complex for the task, provide documentation, minimise belief in "magic". Tools like Make kinda fail here because they are too complex and black-box-like.

For me the big problems with CI setups tend to be:

- They're often slow

- They're often proprietary

- They're often dealing with secrets which limits who can work on them

- You generally can't run them locally

So the feedback cycle for working on them is incredibly long. And working on them is therefore a massive pain.

> You generally can't run them locally

GitLab CI gives you local runners. You can completely self-host CI.

Well, yes, but aren't those runners have different configuration than the runners that are actually deployed and used by your company's CI/CD?