Alexandre-Xavier Labonté-Lamoureux
Alexandre-Xavier Labonté-Lamoureux is a passionate IT professional and DevSecOps advocate based in Montreal, with over eight years of experience spanning DevOps, system administration, and cybersecurity. At Arctiq, he helps organizations build secure, efficient software by advancing Application Security (AppSec), Developer Experience (DevEx), and Internal Developer Platforms. A long-time open-source advocate, he dedicated over six years to volunteering in technology and science clubs at his university, fostering a culture of curiosity and collaboration among like-minded students.
Deeply engaged in the cybersecurity community, Alexandre-Xavier has designed challenges for UnitedCTF, presented at Montréhack, and mentored Canadian student teams at international competitions including the European Cyber Security Challenge (ECSC) and the International Cybersecurity Challenge (ICC). His accolades include the Cybertalent award from École de Cybersécurité, wins at NorthSec and HackQc, and an OCTAS award for leading an innovative domotics project. A lifelong learner currently pursuing a Master's in Software Engineering at ÉTS with a focus on Internal Developer Platforms, Alexandre-Xavier holds knowledge sharing and developer experience at the core of everything he does.
Session
As CI/CD adoption grows, so does complexity. As companies grow, developers who don't stop to think about managing complexity eventually hit the wall: CI/CD pipelines that support dozens of use cases have become so intricate that changing them without breaking something turns into trial and error.
Pipelines must be run to be tested. With enough conditional logic, exhaustively testing every path becomes impossible. In an industry experience, one team I worked with maintained ~1,000 test projects they ran on a 24-runner farm that took a full day to execute, limiting them to one pipeline change per day. This is not the velocity DevOps has promised.
This talk introduces a different model: generating pipelines programmatically. By treating pipelines as a software engineering problem rather than YAML files, you can unit test pipeline logic, apply TDD, and use regression testing, all without running the CI engine.
I'll explore how we can implement pipeline generators on GitHub and GitLab, and explore "YAML-less" pipelines that drop the CI-engine dependency entirely, and connect this to the broader shift seen in tools like Pulumi and Dagger.