shork @noiob@awoo.space

I haven't seen anyone seriously study the environmental impact of continuous integration and the redundant steps of containerised workflows. like, it feels pretty likely that it's at least a nontrivial impact.

the standard in tech nowadays is to download and build everything from scratch when you make a change, such that even a small non-code change can result in upwards of an hour of computing work.

like, for example, at work we use Circle CI, and the standard plugin (Circle calls them Orbs) for Node.js will manually download and extract a copy of Node every single time a container is launched. this makes them all prone to supply-side attacks, requires huge infra on the servers that host the Node builds that also cannot go down without impacting code changes made by loads of people, but is extremely wasteful and probably has a measurable carbon footprint.

I personally don't have the ability at my current job to properly examine and fix this waste, but I hope that at least someone in tech seriously takes a look and figures out a way to at least improve things. at minimum, I feel like open-source projects not bound by deadlines and profit margins should try and reduce waste in their CI pipelines.