In April 2025, I’ll be in Paris at DevoxxFR to present a talk, in French, “For a different take on CI: on the developer’s machine with Dagger”.

In computing, we often talk about cycles over and over again—thick clients, thin clients, server-side rendering, client-side rendering, and so on. Yet if there’s one area that hasn’t evolved much, it’s CI, continuous integration. For years now, we’ve primarily relied on solutions like Jenkins or GitHub Actions that execute, in a more or less centralized fashion, all the necessary tasks remotely. The developer pushes the code, and the CI servers take care of everything that needs to be done.

However, given the efficiency gains and the current power of development machines, wouldn’t it be interesting to bring part of continuous integration closer to the developers, running directly on their own machines?

Of course, this would also mean that we need new tools built around new paradigms.

Let’s explore together the reasons that might —or might not— lead us to shift CI onto the developer’s machine, and how a tool like Dagger (especially with its new Java SDK) can help facilitate this transition.