You Ship or You Shiver
If the phrase “CI/CD” makes your eye twitch, you’re not alone.
You’ve probably deployed by hand on a Friday night. Maybe while someone shouted, “Why is prod down?!” and you were SCP-ing artifacts over SSH, praying Notion had the rollback steps—somewhere in the chaos.
CI/CD done right isn’t just GitHub Actions duct-taped to Jenkins. It’s not a 300-line bash script held together by hope and coffee. It’s when “Is it released yet?” stops being a question—because the pipeline already did the job. Quietly. Confidently. While you sipped that coffee.
The Great Lie: “It Works”
Most teams don’t build CI/CD. They inherit it.
One deploy script becomes two. Then five. Then a bash hydra last touched in 2017.
Nobody wants to change it. Not because it’s elegant—but because it’s terrifying.
Tests fail “sometimes.” Artifacts vanish “randomly.” The rollback guide? Spread across Slack threads, Google Docs, and a little panic.
But hey—it “works.”
Until it doesn’t.
Then comes the blame.
And it ends, as always, with “DevOps.”
Real CI/CD Doesn’t Need You
A proper pipeline doesn’t rely on tribal knowledge. Or on who's on-call.
It runs on Mondays. Fridays. Holidays. Rain or shine.
Here’s what that looks like:
- ✅ Anyone can push a change and know exactly what happens next.
- ✅ Tests are reliable. No flaky builds that cry wolf.
- ✅ Rollback isn’t a rescue mission—it’s just another release.
- ✅ The team trusts the pipeline. They don’t just hope it works.
You could leave tomorrow, and things would still ship safely.
That’s the bar.
Tools Are Just Hammers
CI/CD tools are neutral.
ArgoCD. GitHub Actions. Tekton. GitLab. All solid. All dangerous in the wrong hands.
I’ve seen flawless pipelines written in pure bash.
And I’ve seen YAML that reads like Lovecraft fanfic.
Tools don’t fix culture.
Checkboxes don’t build discipline.
If your team’s motto is “we’ll fix it in prod”—no amount of YAML will save you.
The problem isn’t in .gitlab-ci.yml.
It’s in your habits.
CI/CD Is Trust
It’s not really about speed. It’s about confidence.
Knowing a deploy won’t wreck production.
Trusting your tests. Your teammates. Your tooling.
Having the courage to ship on a Friday—because you have the logs, observability, and rollback to back it up.
CI/CD isn’t a pipeline.
It’s peace of mind.
Final Thought
If every deploy still feels like bomb disposal maybe stop wiring new tools to old habits and start building trust instead.