When someone writes "fixed dependencies" I read "developers can more easily add more bloat before the cardhouse tumbles". That happens for example when the "fixed dependencies" are upgraded.

I am miserable having to touch all this junk. I feel a project is right when I can just git clone it (a few megabytes of data at most) and am left with a self contained repo that was written with minimal dependencies (optimally stored in-tree), and that can be easily built in seconds with a simple shell script on any reasonably modern system.

The bare bones way takes a good amount of initial work, but mostly it's a learning experience. Once one understands a few principles of writing portable software, I'm sure it saves a huge amount of time compared to adding all these shells of junk.

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Oh yeah, I have zero experience about integrating with Kubernetes or whatever. I've been a small time user of Jenkins and CircleCI (unvoluntarily), and when I don't have to set it up and it actually works, it's alright and can help where the developer maybe lacks a bit of discipline (build all targets, run all the tests).

But, I doubt these technologies are a replacement for an ergonomic build environment (with simple python build script or even a crude Makefile). Is incremental building a thing on any of this CI pipelines? Because one thing I want is building really really fast, and it's already way too much overhead if I have to go through a git commit to check this stuff. Don't even think about requiring a full rebuild or Docker image build just to get some quick feedback on a code change.