The Problem with Most CI/CD Tutorials

Most tutorials show you a pipeline that deploys a "hello world" app to a free Heroku instance. They skip the messy parts: secrets, rollbacks, and the moment your pipeline breaks because a dependency changed.

I've been there. After years of fighting with over-engineered setups, I settled on a minimal pipeline that's easy to understand, debug, and extend. It's not fancy, but it works.

The Core Idea

A CI/CD pipeline is just three stages: