I hate cron for running small personal scripts and jobs. I hate ad-hoc handling of logging / observability / success monitoring. I want a web UI for all of it. I hate trying to figure out how to handle event based job triggers that are more fancy than the 10 line bash script they end up running. I hate trying to wrap up solutions for all those into infrastructure as code — I will end up running an unpatched Ubuntu 20 for the next decade if I can't just nuke the box and reload my config + scripts. I hate the idea of relying on the continued existence of a hosted service, as well as them being able to see that I'm fine tuning an LLM for erotic stories (or whatever).
Windmill solved all that for me. I write a short little Python script, paste it into the web UI and boom it's running with good answers for all the above issues. That's great DX.
If workflow engines try to solve every problem they can devolve into plugin and complexity hell. Jenkins issues have caused a lot of headache at my day job lately. I don't want Windmill to fall into the same trap.
