How One Developer Built a CI/CD Pipeline and Discovered Its Real Complexity

A computer science student who previously used managed platforms like Vercel and Render decided to implement a CI/CD pipeline from scratch using GitHub Actions, which reshaped their understanding of the technology. They learned that Continuous Integration automatically verifies and builds new code, while Continuous Deployment pushes that validated code to a live server. GitHub Actions offered key features including configurable events, parallel jobs for frontend and backend, and ephemeral hosted runners on Ubuntu, Windows, or macOS. Because their home server sits behind CGNAT and lacks a public IP, direct SSH access from GitHub Actions was impossible, ruling out a standard deployment approach. The developer solved this by registering their own server as a self-hosted runner, letting GitHub Actions orchestrate jobs while the local machine handles actual deployment execution.