CircleCI Blog

Fifteen weeks out from the launch of CircleCI orbs, there are more than 405 orbs in the Orb Registry. That’s upwards of 25 new orbs per week!

Amazingly, most of these orbs have been contributed by you, our amazing user community, or else by the folks in our new Technology Partner Program. However, there are nearly 30 orbs that have been published by CircleCI, and as CircleCI’s first Community & Partner Engineer, I’ve been spending the last few months working to develop a sustainable development pipeline for these orbs–a pipeline that will allow for building, testing, and deploying with as little manual intervention as possible.

An excerpt from a product manager’s retrospective on the launch of CircleCI orbs.

In November 2018, we launched CircleCI orbs. I recently wrote about the design decisions we made while building new package manager. Here, I want to share some of the lessons we learned (or re-learned) launching a major new feature. You likely won’t be surprised that we think a lot about how to ship working software, and our retro process helps us put in words what we observe and learn along the way.

What follows is an excerpt from our internal retrospective on the orbs launch initiative, edited a bit for public consumption.

In the agile age of software development, speed is the name of the game. This is why CI/CD tools like CircleCI have played such a pivotal role in changing how we work; sending our software along through the pipes at a breakneck pace.

We are always asking questions such as: How fast can we get a new version out to our customers? How can we add these new features and stay on schedule? How can we do these things with as little wasted time and effort as possible?

Open source software components play an important role by providing us with the building blocks of our products. These free software components allow us to skip over the more monotonous work of writing basic features on our own by offering us tried-and-true code. This allows us to focus on our business logics instead of having to build our own frameworks and infrastructures from scratch. However, even as we enjoy the benefits of open source components, they are not without their challenges, especially when it comes to security vulnerabilities.

CircleCI provides useful information around the performance of your jobs and tests. It can tell you when you ran your last run, your median job time, queue time, and success rate, along with some graphs to help you visualize things.

In this blog post, we are going to build a server-side web application using Clojure and a framework called Duct. Why Duct? Most Clojure web applications are built up in a bespoke fashion using a collection of libraries picked and put together by the developer. Duct provides a modular framework that takes away some of the efforts of searching for these libraries and enables you to get a basic, server-side web application up and running faster. There are other Clojure web frameworks, but Duct has a nice mix of defaults without too much of a learning curve.

Our goal at Rookout, the rapid debugging solution, is to help developers debug quickly and effectively, even in places where it would otherwise be hard. Dynamically created staging or testing environments can have a different configuration each time they are created, which leads to unpredictable results and bugs that are impossible to reproduce. Debugging such environments is sometimes just as hard and frustrating as debugging in production. CircleCI orbs make it easy to integrate with Rookout - a solution that makes debugging in production, staging, or test environments just as easy as debugging on your local machine.

With Rookout, you can keep your CI/CD flow fresh and stable, allowing your team to keep pushing features and fixes without fear.

Less than three months ago, we launched CircleCI orbs, our package management ecosystem for CircleCI configuration. In that time we have seen over 300 orbs created in just the first 10 weeks and more than 200 organizations using orbs across over 1,000 projects in tens of thousands of builds. We are also featuring more than 20 official partner orbs through our new Technology Partner Program. We’re incredibly grateful for the huge and positive response.

In this piece, I want to take a look back and share the key design decisions that went into creating and launching CircleCI orbs. If you’re using orbs today and want to understand how to get the most from them, or if you’re thinking about designing your own package management system, this post is for you.

React has taken the frontend world by storm, and for a good reason. It provides an intuitive model for building data-driven user interfaces. React enables us to write declarative components describing the user interface and provide the data needed to render these interfaces. It then efficiently updates the DOM when this data changes. Redux, on the other hand, enables managing the data that React needs to render interfaces. It offers a predictable way to structure and update the data in frontend applications and pairs quite nicely with React.

Happo helps you build your user interface (UI) faster and with confidence. Automated screenshots taken in different browsers and across different screen sizes let you know exactly what parts of the UI change when you push a new commit. Organizations that use CircleCI can now directly integrate Happo using the Happo CircleCI orb.

Over the last year, we have made some critical shifts in our understanding of what we believe makes a great engineering manager at CircleCI, and learned a lot about our needs and values as an organization along the way. We’ve changed our hiring process substantially, and through these efforts we’ve hired some fabulous people, doubling our engineering management team. Today, we want to share all these learnings with you.