Optimising CI pipelines has been a strong aspect of my career so far.

Anybody can build a pipeline to get a task done (thousands of quick & shallow howto blog posts) but doing this efficiently so it becomes a flywheel rather than a blocker for teams is the hard part.

Not just caching but optimising job execution order and downstream dependencies too.

The faster it fails, the faster the developer feedback, and the faster a fix can be introduced.

I quite enjoy the work and always learning new techniques to squeeze extra performance or save time.