I think there is a core truth you're point to that when you're working on the initial months of a start-up, knowledge and time to acquire it are massive weaknesses. If you're using that time to learn how to build your CI pipeline, that's probably not the best allocation of that critical time. An entrepreneur would be best served by CI practices they can employ off their own shelf and focus their attentions on the billable problem solving.
This. It took us three months to market back then, mostly because we skipped everything nonessential. Like, really everything. Sure, these days we have CI/CD with static checking, ChatOps, full observability, all the nice stuff that attracts good developers. But all of that is completely irrelevant to customers. It's just relevant to scaling a dev team.
The very first version we launched publically, we checked out, compiled and deployed through SSH directly on the servers. My first monitoring tool was htop in 3 screens plus some CloudWatch dashboards. A lot of credentials and endpoints were hardcoded. Not because we didn't know better, just to save time.
The number one thing pure techies completely get wrong is opportunity cost. Especially in the beginning, almost nothing beats time to market to validate product/market fit.
