I consider learning how to script or automate things among the most important
investments developers can make early in their career. The progression for a
lot of people was learning to write scripts and then learning how to run those
scripts with cron. Go further.
At least once a week I derive some benefit from the investment in time I had a few years ago in in my Gitea and Jenkins home lab.
At the outset, I used the mirror repository functionality of Gitea combined with the Gitea plugin for Jenkins to make it trivial to keep LAN-local copies of key dependencies
As my needs evolved I ended up with numerous pipelines which do things. Various automations when new tags are introduced in upstream repositories, integration testing of my key tools, or validating correctness of my own projects.
Many of the use-cases I have can be solved on a public forge like GitHub or GitLab however the local nature of my setup affords a number of benefits:
- I am uninhibited in trying all sorts of wacky things because nobody but me will see.
- Task execution is as far as my local hardware (your mileage may vary).
- I don’t need to consider public/private visibility, it’s all personal until otherwise determined.
Despite all the hype around agentic development, many would be surprised at how productivity gains that can be gained by the incremental compound interest of investing in personal automation with run of the mill scripting and CI.
I recommend learning the Jenkins Pipeline syntax, deploying a local Gitea (or Forgejo), and starting to automate the many little things that will benefit your day-to-day software development.