CircleCI Blog

Gaining access into the world of tech hasn’t been the easiest thing for me. I grew up in East Baltimore; I know how unfair the system is. People talk a lot about diversity in tech. Seems to me they think of diversity as what can be seen on the surface, but I believe it’s much deeper than that. For example, most of the other African American people I know in tech came from homes that had both parents and went to really good schools; I grew up with a single mother and went to community college. I dropped out once I finished all my core CS classes so I could start working. People in the Valley get admired when they drop out of elite schools, but if you’re not dropping out of Stanford, you don’t get congratulated. It’s all dependent on your demographic situation.

Last week we were fortunate to host Andrew Maxwell, Senior Engineering Manager at GoPro, and Adam Zimman, VP of Product at LaunchDarkly, at CircleCI for a chat with our CTO Rob Zuber. In their talk Andrew shared how his team at GoPro was able to reduce much of the typical risk associated with a product launch when launching their GoPro Plus last September. Watch the video or read the transcript below to see how GoPro uses continuous integration and feature flags to ensure a successful product launch.

They cover:
-the planning strategies that ensured a surprise-free launch
-how GoPro’s use of feature flags ensures that their engineers never lose sleep
-recent improvements to their CI pipeline

Here’s when and why we will update build images on CircleCI 2.0 and CircleCI 1.0.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Updating Legacy Processes in Your Org

Changing the way teams work is hard. Just think how hard it is to change just yourself. Then sprinkle in the difficulty of getting a group of people using various applications moving in the same direction.

We’ve talked to a lot of teams, and we’ve heard many variations on the same theme in terms of obstacles they foresee in implementing continuous integration:

“My company is a 20 year old company with established processes. Bringing in Continuous Integration would be a huge change to our culture, there are security implications, and it requires a major retooling. I’m going to have to sell this to my boss.”

So, where do you start when embarking on selling a new idea to your boss, to your team, and to everyone else you need to convince to invest?

Continuously deploying Clojure apps to Google App Engine

At CircleCI we write lots of Clojure. The main backend app is > 100,000 lines of Clojure code, and the frontend is > 30,000 lines of ClojureScript.

I love Clojure as a language, so much so that I decided to do my side projects in Clojure, too.

I was quite surprised when I realized that deploying to AWS requires a set of elaborate hacks to just get continuous delivery (push to master on GH -> production) working. Although I use AWS at work every day, I just can’t justify building my own implementation of things like secrets and blue / green deployments for my side projects.

Originally posted on Stackshare.

Background

CircleCI is a platform for continuous integration and delivery. Thousands of engineers trust us to run tests and deploy their code, so they can focus on building great software. That trust rests on a solid stack of software that we use to keep people shipping and delivering value to their users.

As CTO at CircleCI, I help make the big technical decisions and keep our teams happy and out of trouble. Before this, I was CTO of Copious, where I learned a lot of important lessons about tech in service of building a consumer marketplace. I like snowboarding, Funkadelic, and viscous cappuccino.

A couple weeks ago, we released CircleCI 2.0. This was a tremendous effort, involving every person at CircleCI by the time it reached General Availability. Exactly the kind of effort that we try to avoid as a CI/CD company.

We fundamentally changed the guts of our product, and there’s no way for that to not be terrifying. It took six months to get this in front of the first customer, and another nine to get to GA. It’s impossible to tell you how relieved we are to have reached this milestone because it means we can actually start delivering code in small chunks again.

So why would we, as a company that literally has ‘CI’ in its name, spend so much time crafting an actual release? Doesn’t that go against everything we believe?

Docker introduced multi-stage builds in May of 2017. In simplest terms, these are Dockerfiles with more than one FROM statement. With a small tweak, you can build multi-stage Dockerfiles on CircleCI 2.0.

Our mission is to enable teams to do their best work. Today’s release of CircleCI 2.0 represents a huge step forward on that path. Over 5+ years and 65M+ builds, we’ve learned a lot about how the most effective engineering teams work. They commit early and often, and get validation on new ideas immediately. They can spot problems quickly and fix them even faster. Implementing CI/CD frees teams to ship better software faster and individual devs to push code and innovate without fear.

CircleCI has roughly 100 employees and at least 10 of us are here as a result of attending a coding bootcamp. Love them or hate them, bootcamps are here to stay and they’re becoming more entrenched in the hiring pipeline. Course Report counted 30 technology-focused bootcamps in 2013. Today, they list more than 300.