CircleCI Blog

This post is written by Jacque Garcia, who was a summer 2017 Engineering intern at CircleCI.

Hello CS

As a kid from Compton, CA who had never even heard of “coding,” if someone would have told me 4 years ago I would be majoring in Computer Science I would have given them my eyes of suspicion.

I am originally from Compton, California (yes, “Straight Outta” Compton, and no, I have not seen the movie) and I am currently pursuing my Bachelor’s degree at UC Berkeley. I went undeclared my Freshman year after realizing that my major at the time, Chemical Engineering, wasn’t (and wouldn’t) make me happy. Something was missing.

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.

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?

After a bracing conversation with Alek Sharma, our developer advocate, I decided to write an equally bracing call-to-arms describing our hiring process.

So, you’re a software engineer. You’re adept at creating value from abstract concepts, weaving functions together in the loom of your mind. You know that Real Problems™ involve Real Work™ – a potent blend of success and failure, mixed thoroughly and served with a little umbrella.

Image Source

Estragon
Vladimir

ACT I
An open office. A circular dependency.
Evening.

Estragon, sitting on a low ball, is trying to reboot his computer. He pushes the power button with both hands, panting. He gives up, exhausted, rests, tries again. As before.

Enter Vladimir.

ESTRAGON:
(giving up again)
Nothing to be done.

VLADIMIR:
I’m beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I’ve tried to debug it, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven’t yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle.

(He broods, musing on the struggle. Turning to Estragon.)

So there you are again.

Think back to your last one-on-one with your manager.

Did you go for a stroll about town? Did you get coffee? Do you get coffee every single time you have a one-on-one? I hope not, that’s a lot of coffee. It probably made you jittery, didn’t it? Made it hard for you to form words that make sense.

You had a perfect argument for a new tool or process, but it died young on your tongue because of the toxic levels of caffeine coursing through your veins. Yes, sometimes words can be hard. And soft, too. Actually, words come in a variety of textures, and that is the beauty of language.

Software engineers come into this world as blank slates–empty vessels to be filled with facts, yes, but mainly opinions. Opinions are the carbohydrates of programming: they have little nutritional value but occupy space, leaving you with a remarkable feeling of (false) satiety.

CircleCI has hired from many different talent pools, and is delighted to have smart and creative female, female-identified, and non-binary people on its staff. For this year’s International Women’s Day, I asked if any of them would like to share their thoughts about working in tech. And luckily, a few of them were willing to do so, as you can read below. (And p.s.: we’re hiring)

This year we wanted to express our love and appreciation for the devs + ops folks in our lives… in verse. Here are our favorites.

Happy Valentine’s Day, wherever you’re deploying.

To: Dev
From: Dev

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A new survey released by Glassdoor showed that “DevOps Engineer” was one of the top “Best Jobs in America”, second only to “Data Scientist”. The annual ranking is based on salary, job openings, and an overall job satisfaction rating.

2016 was a big year for CircleCI. We had an $18 million Series B round, and released the closed beta of our 2.0 product. Along the way, we saw some great content. Here are the 5 blog posts that got the most views in 2016.

’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the startup
were grim engineers who had taken old BART up
to put out a fire that users had found;
they hacked and they Slacked but did not make a sound.

80+ people. 7 countries. 16 cities. 37 pieces of luggage. We recently brought every member of the worldwide CircleCI team to our San Francisco headquarters for a full week.

Nearly all of our team

Despite the logistical briar patch that arranging a company-wide all-hands can be for a business of our size, the cultural, social, and company benefits of all of of us being in the same place at the same time is invaluable, and well worth a couple of bramble snags.

CircleCI Engineer Tad Whitaker knew he would teach kids about software principles when he volunteered to participate in an international program called Hour of Code. But as he helped students at San Francisco’s Argonne Elementary School for two days this week, he had a surprise: a rise in productivity and engagement when a technical problem forced the students to pair program.

Last year CircleCI Founder Paul Biggar joined forces with the Edith Harbaugh, CEO of LaunchDarkly, to create To Be Continuous, a show about continuous delivery and software development. Catch up with episodes 23, 24, 25, and 26 below, and follow the playlist on Soundcloud to be notified of new ones.

Killing Your Build Servers For Fun And Profit, But Mostly Profit

There’s an infamous quote that circulates among writers: “Kill your darlings.” How violent and succinct! And, as it turns out, quite applicable to software delivery.

Dev horror stories. We all have them. For Halloween, we’ve collected a handful of tales that still haunt our team and others on Twitter. We tried to keep them short, but like Python 3 adoption, they sometimes took longer than originally anticipated. Enjoy.

This is part of our ‘meet the team’ blog series where we get to know the faces behind CircleCI. In this post Jenneviere sits down to tell us a bit about herself, how she joined CircleCI, and what fuels her passion.

Andres joins the team at CircleCI as an Summer 2016 intern. Andres sat down with us to tell us a bit about himself, how he found himself at CircleCI, and where his adventures will take him next.

Last year, CircleCI Founder, Paul Biggar, joined forces with the Edith Harbaugh, CEO of LaunchDarkly to create To Be Continuous, a show about Continuous Delivery and software development. Catch up with episodes 10, 11, and 12 below, and follow the playlist on Soundcloud to be notified of new ones.

The fact is, people need to know what my position on things are. And I can't just say "please don't do that", because people won't listen. I say "On the internet, nobody can hear you being subtle", and I mean it. And I definitely am not willing to string people along, either. I've had that happen too - not telling people clearly enough that I don't like their approach, they go on to re-architect something, and get really upset when I am then not willing to take their work.