I've been running Jenkins for years now. Different companies, different team sizes, but the same story keeps repeating, and at some point I couldn't take it anymore. So I decided to write some of it down. This is Part 1 of what I'm calling My CI/CD Odyssey - ideas I tried, things that blew up in my face, and stuff I still use today.

Later chapters get into the painful stuff: building macOS workers without losing your mind, spot instances as GitHub Actions runners to cut costs, plus a few other rabbit holes. First, the beginning. That's where most of the pain came from.

The "before" picture, and why it hurts

Anyone who's worked with Jenkins for a while knows this scene. Somebody opens the Jenkins UI, clicks "New Item", picks a freestyle or pipeline job, fills in twenty-something fields, scrolls past a wall of plugin options, hits Save.…