I want to tell you about the moment I gave up on Jenkins.

It wasn't dramatic. There was no explosion, no catastrophic failure. It was a Tuesday afternoon, I was three hours deep into debugging a Groovy script in a Jenkinsfile, and I realised I had completely lost the plot. I wasn't writing software anymore. I was maintaining a CI/CD system that had become its own full-time job.

That was the day I started building Callahan CI .

The Problem With Jenkins (You Already Know This)

If you've used Jenkins seriously, you already know the pain:

The plugin ecosystem is enormous, poorly maintained, and a constant source of breakage

The Groovy DSL is powerful but arcane — it feels like a different job from the rest of your work

The UI is dated in a way that goes beyond aesthetics — it's genuinely hard to understand what's happening

Running it locally for development feels like setting up a server farm

Configuration lives in a dozen different places and none of them are obvious

GitHub Actions solved some of this…