Concourse VS Kanboard

Ableton ⬩ Acima ⬩ ACKO ⬩ ActiveState ⬩ Adrima ⬩ AJR International ⬩ Alma ⬩ Astrosat ⬩ Ava ⬩ Avetta ⬩ Azara ⬩ Barmenia ⬩ Basiq ⬩ Beautiful Destinations ⬩ BEC Systems ⬩ Bekk ⬩ Bellroy ⬩ Bendyworks ⬩ Bernoulli Finance ⬩ Blue Fog Training ⬩ BravoTran ⬩ Brilliant ⬩ Budapest School ⬩ Buildr ⬩ Cachix ⬩ CalculoJuridico ⬩ CareRev ⬩ CARFAX ⬩ Caribou ⬩ carwow ⬩ CBANC ⬩ CircuitHub ⬩ CN Group CZ ⬩ CoinTracking ⬩ Concourse CI ⬩ Consensys ⬩ Cornell Tech ⬩ Corvus ⬩ Crowdstrike ⬩ Culture Amp ⬩ Day One ⬩ Deepgram ⬩ diesdas.digital ⬩ Dividat ⬩ Driebit ⬩ Drip ⬩ Emirates ⬩ eSpark ⬩ EXR ⬩ Featurespace ⬩ Field 33 ⬩ Fission ⬩ Flint ⬩ Folq ⬩ Ford ⬩ Forsikring ⬩ Foxhound Systems ⬩ Futurice ⬩ FörsäkringsGirot ⬩ Generative ⬩ Genesys ⬩ Geora ⬩ Gizra ⬩ GWI ⬩ HAMBS ⬩ Hatch ⬩ Hearken ⬩ hello RSE ⬩ HubTran ⬩ IBM ⬩ Idein ⬩ Illuminate ⬩ Improbable ⬩ Innovation through understanding ⬩ Insurello ⬩ iwantmyname ⬩ jambit ⬩ Jobvite ⬩ KOVnet ⬩ Kulkul ⬩ Logistically ⬩ Luko ⬩ Metronome Growth Systems ⬩ Microsoft ⬩ MidwayUSA ⬩ Mimo ⬩ Mind Gym ⬩ MindGym ⬩ Next DLP ⬩ NLX ⬩ Nomalab ⬩ Nomi ⬩ NoRedInk ⬩ Novabench ⬩ NZ Herald ⬩ Permutive ⬩ Phrase ⬩ PINATA ⬩ PinMeTo ⬩ Pivotal Tracker ⬩ PowerReviews ⬩ Practle ⬩ Prima ⬩ Rakuten ⬩ Roompact ⬩ SAVR ⬩ Scoville ⬩ Scrive ⬩ Scrivito ⬩ Serenytics ⬩ Smallbrooks ⬩ Snapview ⬩ SoPost ⬩ Splink ⬩ Spottt ⬩ Stax ⬩ Stowga ⬩ StructionSite ⬩ Studyplus For School ⬩ Symbaloo ⬩ Talend ⬩ Tallink & Silja Line ⬩ Test Double ⬩ thoughtbot ⬩ Travel Perk ⬩ TruQu ⬩ TWave ⬩ Tyler ⬩ Uncover ⬩ Unison ⬩ Veeva ⬩ Vendr ⬩ Verity ⬩ Vnator ⬩ Vy ⬩ W&W Interaction Solutions ⬩ Watermark ⬩ Webbhuset ⬩ Wejoinin ⬩ Zalora ⬩ ZEIT.IO ⬩ Zettle

> Why bother, when Dagger caches everything automatically?

The fear with needing to run `npm ci` (or better, `pnpm install`) before running dagger is on the amount of time required to get this step to run. Sure, in the early days, trying out toy examples, when the only dependencies are from dagger upstream, very little time at all. But what happens when I start pulling more and more dependencies from the Node ecosystem to build the Dagger pipeline? Your documentation includes examples like pulling in `@google-cloud/run` as a dependency: https://docs.dagger.io/620941/github-google-cloud#step-3-cre... and similar for Azure: https://docs.dagger.io/620301/azure-pipelines-container-inst... . The more dependencies brought in - the longer `npm ci` is going to take on GitHub Actions. And it's pretty predictable that, in a complicated pipeline, the list of dependencies is going to get pretty big - at least a dependency per infrastructure provider we use, plus inevitably all the random Node dependencies that work their way into any Node project, like eslint, dotenv, prettier, testing dependencies... I think I have a reasonable fear that `npm ci` just for the Dagger pipeline will hit multiple minutes, and then developers who expect linting and similar short-run jobs to finish within 30 seconds are going to wonder why they're dealing with this overhead.

It's worth noting that one of Concourse's problems was, even with webhooks setup for GitHub to notify Concourse to begin a build, Concourse's design required it to dump the contents of the webhook and query the GitHub API for the same information (whether there were new commits) before starting a pipeline and cloning the repository (see: https://github.com/concourse/concourse/issues/2240 ). And that was for a CI/CD system where, for all YAML's faults, for sure one of its strengths is that it doesn't require running `npm ci`, with all its associated slowness. So please take it on faith that, if even a relatively small source of latency like that was felt in Concourse, for sure the latency from running `npm ci` will be felt, and Dagger's users (DevOps) will be put in an uncomfortable place where they need to defend the choice of Dagger from their users (developers) who go home and build a toy example on AlternateCI which runs what they need much faster.

> I will concede that Dagger’s clustering capabilities are not great yet

Herein my argument. It's not that I'm not convinced that building pipelines in a general-purpose programming language is a better approach compared to YAML, it's that building pipelines is tightly coupled with the infrastructure that runs the pipelines. One aspect of that is scaling up compute to meet the requirements dictated by the pipeline. But another aspect is that `npm ci` should not be run before submitting the pipeline code to Dagger, but after submitting the pipeline code to Dagger. Dagger should be responsible for running `npm ci`, just like Concourse was responsible for doing all the interpolation of the `((var))` syntax (i.e. you didn't need to run some kind of templating before submitting the YAML to Concourse). If Dagger is responsible for running `npm ci` (really, `pnpm install`), then it can maintain its own local pnpm store / pipeline dependency caching, which would be much faster, and overcome any shortcomings in the caching system of GitHub Actions or whatever else is triggering it.

> Imagine you live in a world where no part of the build has to repeat unless the changes actually impacted it. A world in which all builds happened with automatic parallelism. A world in which you could reproduce very reliably any part of the build on your laptop.

That sounds similar to https://concourse-ci.org/

I quite like it, but it never seemed to gain traction outside of Cloud Foundry.

I used Concourse[0] for a while. No real complaints, the visibility is nice but the functionality isn't anything new.

[0] https://concourse-ci.org/

We run https://concourse-ci.org/ on our own hardware at our office. (as a side note, running your own hardware, you realise just how abysmally slow most cloud servers are.)

Concourse: https://concourse-ci.org

We use https://concourse-ci.org/ at the moment and have been reasonably happy with it, however it only has support for linux containers at the moment, no windows containers. (MacOS doesn't have a containers primitive yet unfortunately)

Linux Mint with Cinnamon: https://www.linuxmint.com/ as far as desktop OSes go it's familiar (Ubuntu without snaps by default), whereas the UI feels both snappy, doesn't use too much resources and is actually pretty to look at.

MobaXTerm: https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/ this one is a bit more Windows centric but I ended up paying for it and replaced mRemoteNg and PuTTY with it, it's even better than Remmina or whatever Linux has to offer - you can manage SSH/RDP/VNC/... sessions, input across multiple sessions side by side and it just simplifies things a lot (jump host support, a port forwarding too and so much more).

GitKraken: https://www.gitkraken.com/ also a piece of software that I paid for, this one actually makes using Git pleasant, feels better to use than SourceTree and Git Cola (even though that latter is wonderfully lightweight, too) and honestly I prefer that to the CLI nowadays.

Kanboard: https://kanboard.org/ is a lightweight Kanban project management tool, it might not have every feature under the sun but it's the most snappy project management tool I've ever used, looks simple and runs well. I honestly love it, what a nice thing to have.

Most modern text editors and IDEs: I personally pay for JetBrains IDEs but also like Visual Studio Code as a text editor and both have helped me immensely, they're reasonably performant when you have the RAM, look nice, often give you suggestions about how to improve your code and also have a plethora of plugins in their ecosystems. Nowadays I unapologetically use LLMs as well and overall it feels like I have these great tools and cool autocomplete (that is sometimes a bit silly and wrong) at my disposal, that makes me happy.

Kdenlive: https://kdenlive.org/ imagine if there was a successor to Windows Movie Maker, though something that gets most of the important stuff out of Sony Vegas, except is also completely free and works on most platforms. Kdenlive is all of that and also somehow quite pleasant to use, I actually prefer it to DaVinci resolve. There is a bit of a learning curve to any piece of software like this, but everything mostly makes sense in this one.

Gitea: https://about.gitea.com/ I still use this for my personal Git repositories and integrating with CI systems and it's lightweight, looks good and just feels pleasant to use. Previously I self-hosted GitLab and constantly ran into resource exhaustion as well as doubts about the next update is going to corrupt all of my data and break (it did), so now I use Gitea instead.

Drone CI: https://www.drone.io/ a container native CI solution that I can also self host. It's container oriented, integrates with Gitea nicely, is similarly nice to GitLab CI and doesn't cause me headaches like Jenkins would.

Docker: https://www.docker.com/ yes, even Docker desktop. It just makes working with containers really pleasant and predictable, even when something like Podman also exists (and also is great). I don't know, I feel like Docker really saved me from having brittle legacy environments, even self-contained containers with health checks and resource limits with still the same brittle code inside of those make me feel way more safe.

For someone that's not a web developer, I found Kanboard to be the easiest to set up, and it has all the basic features you'd expect. It's a traditional PHP app where you copy the files to your web server and set a few configuration options and you're good. If you want to use it locally, you download it, run php -S localhost:8080, and start using it.

https://kanboard.org/

Note: The project is in maintenance mode, it hasn't shut down or been abandoned.

I kicked off 2024 with an attempt to get more organized and continue my quest to rely less on big tech. To start things off, I’m trying out an open-source taskboard called Kanboard. It’s like Trello but without all the integrations or surprises. I’ve been using it for personal tasks and side projects. I like these boards for dumping out the things I want to do and then visually sorting them into their status and priority. Doing the things is still hard, but at least I know what I’ve got on my plate.

https://kanboard.org has a kanban board.

For the Kanban experience, I was using Kanboard. It is perfect for Project management and it allows for relations between the cards as well. It is also solid in terms of stability. It is also very lightweight and can easily run on Raspberry Pi. The only downside is that the UI feels a little outdated and it is not Mobile friendly.

Kanboard is a possible solution if you want something self-hosted and open-source - https://kanboard.org/

Checkout kanboard. It's free and open source.

Contrast with https://github.com/kanboard/kanboard/blob/main/app/Schema/Postgres.php - a very similar set up with projects, tasks and columns.