Why You Should Embrace Continuous Integration

Originally published at www.scalablepath.com by Andres on March 7, 2018.

We’ve all been there: you clone a repository, run your project and… nothing happens. Well, nothing but a series of errors; from missing files to compiler warnings. You seek some advice and ask your co-worker: “I just cloned the repo, but nothing seems to work and the readme file is blank. Do you know what’s going on?”. That’s when you hear it. The most overused excuse in the dev world.

“It worked on my computer”

This excuse, and others like it: “Last time I worked on the project everything was fine”, “Did you install all the dependencies?”, “The last person to work on it was X, ask him” are not just annoying but entirely unnecessary these days. Oh, and feel free to add any excuses you have heard to this list via the comments section. I’m sure we could put together quite a collection!

Working on a new project is hard enough; new tools, new code, new business logic, (maybe even a) new programming language. And then, on top of that, we add another layer of complexity for a newcomer: a broken build.

There are multiple approaches out there that attempt to solve this issue. From the inexpensive, but far from foolproof, readme.txt file solution, all the way to the more complex, but efficient…