Today, we're thrilled to have Tommy Graves, co-founder of RWX, a company focusing on building tools that optimize build and test performance, reliability, and developer experience. In this episode, we're delving deep into the realm of CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment), with a special focus on Mint - their latest CI platform. We'll be exploring its unique features, how it differs from its competitors, caching, security, cost-efficiency in production pipelines.

Apart from that, we'll also discuss GitHub Actions along with it's biggest flaws and finally demystifying CI/CD, as it is not the big monster a lot of developers perceive it to be.

Learn back-end development - https://boot.dev
Listen on your favorite podcast player: https://www.backendbanter.fm

Mint: https://www.rwx.com/mint

Timestamps:

00:54 Who is Tommy Graves
05:14 What is Continuous Integration?
06:57 What is Mint trying to solve, that isn't solved by other CI/CD platforms
09:57 Better Semantic Output on a CI/CD platform
14:20 What's the benefit to the structure of semantic logging, apart from visualization
15:23 CI/CD course on Boot.dev
17:59 Does Mint make it cheaper for companies that have high CI/CD expenses?
19:12 Why don't other companies do caching the way Mint does?
25:49 There are security implications of using the same platform for both CI and CD
30:42 How smaller teams could benefit from Mint
33:15 Verifying changes to the deployment workflow with GitHub Actions and Mint
36:49 Is GitHub Actions dominating the space or is there still competition?
39:04 One of the biggest frustrations with GitHub Actions
42:03 Does Mint relate to the Unix philosophy?
48:07 How does configuring the CI/CD tools drive the philosophy of Mint
50:36 Just understand CI/CD, you won't need those courses dedicated to CI/CD platforms
53:45 CI/CD is not as esoteric as it sounds
58:48 Where to find Mint