After 15 years, I use Outlook as my build pipeline
48 comments
·November 22, 2025easterncalculus
throw-the-towel
TIL that Jenkins was only released in 2011. Feels like it's been around since forever.
wiether
If you're like me, in your mind Hudson and Jenkins are the same thing, so maybe you started using "Jenkins" before 2011 when the renaming happened!
TechSquidTV
2011 was a huge year for tech/devops. I feel like so much of what we do now started right then for some reason.
hshdhdhj4444
I think that might be because it was called Hudson before that I believe.
Unless that was a different project altogether?
usrusr
Same project, rebranded around Oracle. Basically MySQL/MariaDB without the alliteration.
philo_sophia
>When you leave software developers alone for too long, they start developing software
I've gotten so bored at work lately I've been coding for fun again
rAum
Long ago, I used to work at some bank, where SVN branch merging was always super painful and instead of solving people problem, there was holy, e-mail based system running on our common dev machines.
After recieving properly formatted email, script was executed to apply git merge between svn branches. In case of merge issues, the email was sent back with feedback. If everything was okay, a proper sign-off blessing by one of the technopriests as late check was applied and merge concluded.
TechSquidTV
I can not believe blogspot is still alive. I just went there and it auto-signed me in via my Google account to "Blogger" where there are some posts from Google's blogspot. The last post was in 2020 https://blogger.googleblog.com/
corysama
I knew a guy who would brag that he used Outlook as his build system 20 years ago. Builds would take 9 to 24 months depending on the complexity of the project. But, as the CTO of a mid-sized software company, it worked for him.
ebiester
CTOs are the original vibe coders.
ramon156
> Builds would take 9 to 24 months depending on the complexity of the project.
I might be stupid, are you saying a build would take 9 to 24 months to finish?
uliqquel
Maybe the build system was him sending the email to some factory that would encode it into the silicon of a chip and ship the chip back to him.
gdulli
They're saying he used Outlook to assign a project to a team.
wiether
Yeah, it confused me also
Either its the wrong unit (minutes?) or the wrong definition of "build"?
jbverschoor
/Mail/Messaging in SMTP, and you have what it is: A message broker and queue. It has durability, retries, everything
afavour
Memories of waiting for months to get access to a MS SQL database and ending up putting an Access database on a network share for multiple user access instead. A horrible, horrible hack solution. But it worked!
wswope
I volunteered at an archaeology lab run by the state govt a few months ago.
Knowing I was a data engineer, one of the archaeologists asked me to take a look at the cataloging system he’d cobbled together on his own: a shared-drive Access database with a full-featured CRUD interface that the whole office had been using for years.
I was able to clean up one stray bug he had, and confirm his suspicion that one particular action was running slow because it had to touch multiple files by necessity (he’d rolled his own sharding) — but generally speaking, it was a work of art more effective than anything I could’ve ever come up with. Sometimes the “dirty hacks” are the best solutions.
skydhash
The avoidance of dirty hacks are not because they don’t work. They do and can be pretty X-effective when you’re short on X. But the end result is that when you need to switch away from the hacks, then the interest paid on X can be enormous. If X includes time, it may never be repaid.
1970-01-01
Good. The next step is turning that into an OS. From there, you should be able to take it further and fully support virtualization.
Proofread0592
As a dev currently working at a company where getting an access request fulfilled can sometimes take weeks, I feel this author's pain.
But it seems like an enormous security hole, even with a codeword "password". The author didn't mention it, but I hope they're using whatever version of their company's E2E email encryption is for these messages.
yabones
Yeah, this is textbook "shadow IT" that could easily lead to something going seriously wrong. It's a fun example, but not something to aspire to.
Ultimately the problem is that in a lot of big corps, IT is basically unaccountable for setting things up wrong. Their only KPI is tickets closed, not the quality or success rate of their fixes.
Jean-Papoulos
>Shoddy stuff that has no chance of making its way into production is permissible
That's cute.
FuriouslyAdrift
You can use git as a backend for an MTA and come full circle...
adastra22
This is horrifying.
I don't know if Telegram, Slack, Discord, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or Kubernetes will be around (or without massive breaking changes) in 20 years, but email absolutely will be.