CircleCI Blog

or, How as a support engineer I wrote our most-used orb to date (and how you can too)

Experience In Open Source

If you’re a new developer, I’m here to encourage you to consider writing an orb. Orbs are a great way to add some open source experience to your resume while demonstrating most of the skills software engineering roles look for.

• Open source development experience
• Experience with continuous integration and continuous deployment
• Git and Bash experience

It’s really easy to hit all of these major points with a simple orb, even one that just posts messages to a Slack channel. This is, in fact, what I did build, and what I will discuss in this blog post.

Our goal at Codecov is to provide relevant, timely data to help developers and teams understand and improve their code’s quality. We do this by providing highly integrated tools to group, merge, archive, and compare coverage reports. Using Codecov, an engineering team can create a good testing culture while seeing the impact of each new commit on overall coverage metrics.

Codecov began as a project to solve one developer’s personal frustration with being unable to quickly and easily see what code was being tested. From there, it has grown into a tool that is used by everyone from independent developers to open source projects, from small agencies to massive enterprises. No matter the project or the team size, everyone can benefit from a better understanding of their code’s quality, and we believe that code coverage is an essential part of that understanding.

As applications get more sophisticated, it becomes necessary to ensure that teams can test and deliver their code in a consistent and repeatable fashion. One of the most difficult aspects of testing a web-based application has always been the application itself; testing the user’s paths through your interface is a critical but challenging aspect of project delivery. User interface tests have traditionally been very involved to set up and maintain, often requiring a very technical and experienced skillset. Ghost Inspector solves this problem by providing simple-to-use tooling that allows anyone on your team to create and maintain your browser-based tests. QA teams can to deliver more quickly, more consistently, and test more thoroughly within your application.