CircleCI Blog

When Dollar Shave Club began using CircleCI, they found it improved not just their CI/CD pipeline, but their production monitoring and release management operations as well, while making their developers’ lives easier. They came to us wanting to share the story of their transition to CI and how using CircleCI has helped them improve developer experience while increasing the quality of their software and their speed of delivery. Read on for their story.

In a previous post, we saw which industries had the most builds on December 24th and December 25th in 2015. In this post, we’ll see who had the most builds on New Year’s Day (Jan 1).

Huge thanks to everyone who joined us at the Heavybit Clubhouse for our May Office Hours last night with a talk from CircleCI CTO Rob Zuber! Rob’s presentation on managing the migration from monolith to microservices was enthralling and insightful. Rob and the rest of the team enjoyed chatting with you about what you’re building and how you’re using CircleCI!

For anyone who couldn’t make it out, we’ll be sharing a link to the video from the talk soon.

What’s next?

CircleCI was founded on a simple vision: to make developers more productive. Today represents an important milestone for CircleCI, as we announce our $18M Series B financing round that we’re confident will set the stage for continued growth in this year and beyond. The round was led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from existing investors DFJ, Baseline Ventures and Harrison Metal.

Our dance card was full this round, and Scale Venture Partners perfectly suited our company in both market and culture fit. I’m pleased to welcome Andy Vitus, from Scale Venture Partners to the CircleCI Board of Directors.

The market is uncertain right now, but in the face of uncertainty, good businesses are being built and financed. We want to be there for the next generation of great companies to build on CircleCI. Our funding announcement sends a strong message to our team, our users, and our partners that validates our leadership position and direction in our market.

This funding allows us to grow our company in accordance with our values: a focus on productivity, a company-wide commitment to speak and listen to our customers, and to continue to build stellar products for smart software teams. These are core to what we do at CircleCI and they will remain core as we continue our trend of growth.

We’re always looking for ways to make CircleCI docs better. In fact, you may have read that we recently open-sourced docs, which we’re very excited about since it allows us to more quickly create new docs and more easily update our current docs. Our next step is to improve how the docs site is structured, and to that end we’re looking for your input.

Over the last few days we have updated the OS X build image with the latest Xcode 7.3.1. Additionally, we included more recent versions of Carthage and fastlane with the container by default. This should help you stay up-to-date with the newest developer tools.

At CircleCI, we strive to have a product that works, right out of the box. And, for the few edge cases that don’t or users with special configurations, we know it’s important for you to be able to find answers yourself to keep your team running as efficiently as possible, which is why we have extensive documentation.

A few weeks ago we blogged about how we are using our community site to gather feedback and ship features and announced our first ever “Developers’ Choice” poll. We are excited to announce the Developers’ Choice results.

A big thanks to everyone who joined us at the Heavybit Clubhouse for our April Office Hours last week. The engineers at Shyp offered up a fascinating presentation on their command line interface, and it was such a pleasure to have them as a guest on our stage. We enjoyed meeting you and chatting with you about what you’re building and how you’re using CircleCI!

Here at CircleCI, we place extremely high value on our team, and from the beginning have striven to create a company that is a welcome and diverse place where all employees are treated with the utmost respect and care. As the first employee after the co-founders themselves, I’ve watched that company culture carefully, taking special interest to help guide it as we’ve grown to our current 48 employees. Given my history with the company, and the great care that I put into our culture, I am honored that last night CircleCI was awarded one of the Bay Area’s Best Places to Work 2016 by the San Francisco Business Times and The Silicon Valley Business Journal.

We recently rolled out a number of new features for all CircleCI users. One of the most requested features focused on the permissions setting. This blog will take a deep dive into the new feature, how it works, and what it means for you and your team using CircleCI.

At the end of March, CircleCI’s developer evangelist, Kevin Bell, gave a talk at our monthly Office Hours meetup. If you weren’t able to make the talk in person, you’ll find it in its entirety in the video below.

“It took me years of struggling with Bash before I felt like I could actually use it to save time doing any given task. I could throw together a command or two in the terminal and write very simple scripts, but it was always faster and easier for me to switch to a language like Python to do anything significant. In this short, example-filled presentation, I’m going to try to cover the elements of Bash and a couple CLI tools that made me a true believer, who reaches to Bash for most odd jobs.”

We are happy to announce the release of the new OS X build image. In this release we include the most recent version of OS X with all the latest security updates, the recently released Xcode 7.3, plus the updated versions of git, fastlane and carthage.

Background

Amazon’s Auto Scaling groups (ASG) are, in theory, a great way to scale. The idea is that you give them a desired capacity, and the knowledge of how to launch more machines, and they will fully automate spinning your fleet up and down as the desired capacity changes. Unfortunately, in practice, there are a couple key reasons that we can’t use them to manange our CircleCI.com fleet, one of the most important being that the default ASG termination policy kills instances too quickly. Since our instances are running builds for our customers, we can’t simply kill them instantly. We must wait for all builds to finish before we can terminate an instance.

Today, we are excited to announce not one, but two new offerings!

We spent the better part of 2015 building a better mobile platform. We know software teams don’t just build iOS in a vacuum, it’s generally part of a broader stack. Software teams want to build all of their software on one platform. After acquiring Distiller to help realize our mobile vision, and more than a year in public beta and limited release, CircleCI for OS X is generally available today.

We’re thrilled to announce that registration is now open for our first webinar of 2016!

We are excited to announce per-project Insights. Generally available for all paid and open source customers, CircleCI per-project Insights helps you understand the performance of your project over time.

To get started: Click on the new ‘Insights’ icon on the main navigation. Once on the Insights dashboard, you can click on your repo name to access per-project insights.

We are proud to announce the public beta of Trusty image. If you’re part of the Inner Circle, CircleCI’s beta program, you already have access! If you’re not yet a member of the Inner Circle, but would like to have beta access to new features like Trusty image, learn more about joining here.

DeveloperWeek 2016 is San Francisco’s largest one-week tech event series with over 60 week-long events including the DeveloperWeek 2016 Conference & Expo, the DeveloperWeek Hackathon, Official Hiring Mixer, and dozens of city-wide partner events. The events epicenter at Pier 27, just blocks away from CircleCI’s San Francisco office, and many of our members of our team will be in attendance.

Come join us for Office Hours in San Francisco where Kevin Bell, Developer Evangelist at CircleCI, will take us through: Tips and Tricks to Use Bash — Wednesday, February 17, 2016.

Join us for CircleCI’s February Office Hours. We want to meet the developers and software teams who use CircleCI and hear about all the great things you’re doing.

Last week, CircleCI founder Paul Biggar sat down for an in-depth interview with Scott Raney and Lenny Pruss of Memory Leak.

What is continuous deployment (CD), and how is it achieved? What common mistakes happen along the road to CD? How is continuous integration different from CD? These are the types of questions that keep us up at night, so we’ve partnered with Rainforest QA for our first webinar of 2016 to discuss how organizations can get to continuous deployment without compromising quality.

In the last 5 years, at Resultados Digitais, we have grown our product area to 60 people split into 7 teams. We now do over 12 deploys per day using Slack and commit every 5 minutes. But it was not like that some years ago.

We’re kicking off 2016 with our first installment of Office Hours!

Office Hours feature a 20-40 minute Customer Speaker Series followed by an open Q+A, networking, and live personalized support from our CircleCI engineers. It’s a great opportunity to meet other developers and software teams who use CircleCI.

We have added support for XCode 7.2 to our OS X containers.

CircleCI customers can build their apps using Xcode 7.2. Full support for Xcode 7.2 allows OS X developers using CircleCI to build and test their code for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch apps with the most current tools available. We also recently updated the developer tools on our container to latest versions. These tools include CocoaPods, Fastlane, Carthage and XCTool.

A few months ago, 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. The show has continued to be a success, and covers a broad range of topics. Catch up with all nine previous episodes below, and follow the playlist on Soundcloud to be notified of new ones.

Available today, all our users have access to CircleCI’s new look. We’ve been working with our beta users on fine tuning our design over the past several weeks. We’ve listened to your requests and tried our best to address the most important items first. Thank you so much for providing us with great feedback and helping us improve our product. We’ll keep on working to improve your experience with CircleCI.

For those who tried our beta, the new look should feel smoother. You’ll notice we added back the function of collapsible repos in the left column. We heard lots of input from our beta users around our use of fonts, colors and whitespace.

So for those who are saying hello to our new look for the first time, here’s what’s new.

Over the last four years we’ve helped thousands of development teams ship better applications, faster. After hearing from customers that wanted a way to use CircleCI behind their own firewall, we set out to make that possible. We tested CircleCI Enterprise with dozens of customers, and we’re excited to announce that as of today, CircleCI Enterprise is generally available.

I just gave a fun little presentation at the Docker meetup last night at the Heavybit clubhouse. The video of the talk should be online soon, but until then here’s a little recap of the content.

This fall, CircleCI founder Paul Biggar spoke on the panel, “Perpetual Motion” at Web Summit Dublin. The panel featured Edith Harbaugh, co-founder and CEO of LaunchDarkly, Matt Harris, co-founder of Sendwithus and was moderated by Josh Holmes, director of architecture at Microsoft.

At CircleCI, iteration is one of our company’s core tenets. Most recently, we turned our attention inward and are proud to unveil our new UI, now available in public beta. Starting today all our users have the ability to opt-in to the new design with the click of a button.

As we grow, we are faced with the challenge to increase functionality while keeping our design simple and undisruptive. We have been working with our users, who are part of The Inner Circle (our private beta user group) adding features and making changes based directly on their feedback.

[photo credit: Electric Cloud]

Yesterday, CircleCI founder Paul Biggar had a chance to sit down for the Continuous Discussions Podcast, alongside Scott Abate of Propelics and hosts Sam Fell and Anders Wallgren of Electric Cloud.

We’re proud to announce our new Beta program, the Inner Circle. As a member of CircleCI’s Inner Circle you get exclusive access to new features and settings before they are released publicly!

TL;DR: We now support Xcode 7.1.1 for OS X builds.

Today, CircleCI announced full support of Xcode 7.1.1 for OS X builds.

Full support for Xcode 7.1.1 allows OS X developers using CircleCI to build and test their code for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch apps with the most current tools available. CircleCI previously supported Xcode 7.0.1.

Today we are happy to announce we shipped CircleCI Insights. Available for all paid and open source customers, Insights is an interactive visual dashboard enabling you to see and understand all your builds for CircleCI at a glance.

With CircleCI Insights, we help make sense of all your build data, clearly and in real time. Insights gives you the tools to dig deep into your build history and find the meaningful statistics to improve performance and keep your team shipping at an optimal pace.

I ❤️ ftrain. Few writers can capture the joy, poignancy, existential terror and profound connection at the heart of Internet culture, but Paul Ford (the real-live person behind ftrain.com, medium/@ftrain, and countless other Internet words) has the historical context and raw talent to consistently enthrall. As I sat down to write this post, I peeked over at his Medium blog and went down the rabbit hole, smiling like an idiot and laughing out loud as my coworkers moved desks outside the office I’m squatting in.

We’re excited to announce the official launch of Discuss CircleCI!

I just learned about the ldd command and I wanted to share it with you. This might be useful if you’re trying to get control over a messy project by putting it in a container. A project lacking strict attention to dependencies and automation from the beginning often ends up a mess (we know this from helping a lot of customers clean up their messes). Getting a project like this running from a base Docker image requires a lot of work to figure out which dependencies need to be installed. ldd will help you find those dependencies.

I was reading Adriaan de Jonge’s excellent post about creating the smallest possible container to run a Go program.

Earlier this month the CircleCI team made its way to Pier 70 for GitHub Universe. The event was awesome! It was great to be able to hear about all of the cool things that GitHub is working on as well as being able to chat with developers about some of the challenges they face in the CI space. We came away feeling really good about the future of GitHub and are excited to be a part of it.

It has been a very busy week in the world of mobile CI and CD. There’s a growing need for mobile support (both iOS and Android) with the announcement of GH Integrations Directory. Here is what we are doing to keep up with the iOS builds demand.

Recently, 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. With four episodes well underway, the show covers a wide range of topics. You can follow the playlist on Soundcloud to be notified of new episodes, and to catch up with the first four while you’re waiting.

Last week the CircleCI Team was excited to sponsor the Tech Crunch Disrupt hackathon. We met a lot of awesome developers and it was great to be able to talk with them about testing, continuous integration, and continuous delivery. There were a lot of teams who tried out Circle for the first time, and a handful of folks who even used Circle in their hackathon entries.

In September 2013 we blogged about why we’re supporting Typed Clojure, and you should too! Now, 2 years later, our engineering team has made a collective decision to stop using Typed Clojure (specifically the core.typed library). As part of this decision, we wanted to write a blog-post about our experience using core.typed.

The reason that we decided to stop using core.typed was because we found that the cost of using it was greater than the benefit we gained. This is a subjective view, of course, so we will detail our reasoning below.

TL;DR: Simple demo of Docker checkpoint & restore

Start a container

$ export cid=$(docker run -d busybox tail -f /dev/null)

It has been a little a over a year now since CircleCI began providing first-class Docker support. Docker Hub was brand-new at the time, and as with any new piece of tech, there was uncertainty about how exactly it would be received and adopted. Way back in mid-2014, there were minimal serious production hosting options, and Docker Hub was mostly a handy way to download and share base images, and maybe save yourself the headache of needing a Fortran compiler to install SciPy on your laptop.

The CircleCI team is gearing up for the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Hackathon the weekend of September 19-20.

As a TCD Hackathon sponsor, CircleCI is sponsoring a custom contest. The CircleCI team will reward the team with their favorite demo with a $1000 Apple gift card. All you need to do to be eligible is create an account on CircleCI and perform at least one build. Make sure to include your team’s GitHub usernames with your project submission. You can build any project to be eligible, but extra points may be awarded for using CircleCI extensively for your hackathon project.

There’s a bit of a cottage industry forming around updating the Joel Test or producing more purpose-specific variations of it. If you’re not familiar with the Joel test, it’s Joel Spolsky’s “irresponsibly quick” way of measuring the quality of a development team. I find these fascinating to read, and wanted to contribute one in the latter category— a Joel Test specifically for continuous delivery (the practice of delivering software in short cycles that can be released at any time).

Last week I wrote It’s the Future, a piece that satirized the container ecosystem, lightly mocking Docker and Google and CoreOS and a bunch of other technologies. Lots of Docker enthusiasts enjoying being the butt of the joke, but it was also much loved and shared by lots of people yelling “I told you this was all bullshit”.

Hey, my boss said to talk to you - I hear you know a lot about web apps?

-Yeah, I’m more of a distributed systems guy now. I’m just back from ContainerCamp and Gluecon and I’m going to Dockercon next week. Really excited about the way the industry is moving - making everything simpler and more reliable. It’s the future!

As we looked forward into our 3rd year as a company, with over 23 million builds to date and more than 25 employees worldwide, we knew it was time to give our brand an updated look and feel. We worked to create a solid design base and cohesive style sheet. Instead of a huge overhaul to our site, we tackled the redesign like we do most things at CircleCI: by making continual, iterative changes as we determined what worked best for any given scenario.

The container wars have started!

Containers have a huge amount of hype and momentum, and there are many spoils for whoever becomes dominant in the container ecosystem. The two major startups innovating in this space–CoreOS and Docker–have waged war on each other as part of gaining that control.

Tl;DR: Instead of naively splitting tests among build containers, CircleCI now divides tests intelligently based on execution time.

TL;DR: CircleCI now tells you exactly which tests failed in our web UI, email notifications, and chat integrations.

CircleCI was founded on the promise of making testing less of a pain for developers, and today we’re announcing a big step forward in delivering on that promise. Most of us are used to learning of a failure on CI being the beginning of a little hunting session. We get an email or a chat message that says a build failed, and then the spelunking begins to track down the root cause. CircleCI now mitigates or removes this nuisance by displaying detailed information about which exact test cases failed in our web UI, build emails, and chat integrations.

At CircleCI, we’ve got a lot of tests. We build a product that’s fundamental to the workflow of developers across the world, so we try hard to validate that what goes into production is well tested. Historically, we’ve tested our frontend entirely through Webdriver tests, but with our transition to using ClojureScript for our UI, we took some time to reevaluate how to best test our new code.

CircleCI swag just got better!

Our customers have been demanding mobile app testing and deployment support for a while now, and today we’ve done something about it. We acquired Distiller, a company focused on OS X testing and deployment—our first acquisition! We’ve incorporated their technology and expertise into CircleCI, and now you can use it to test your mobile apps!

Like most programmers, I spend a fair amount of time chasing down and repairing bugs.

A lot of bugfixing is about as fun as whack-a-mole: a bug pops up, you mash it with the mallet, you wait for the next one. There’s some satisfaction from whacking those little brown lumps… I guess… but the game never seems to end! I think this is what people fear when they think of maintenance programming: it’s like a game of whack-a-mole… forever.

Continuous Integration and Delivery are best practices for software development, and are part of CircleCI’s mission: to help developers move faster and ship faster. Until now, using CI/CD outside of work has been difficult: using CircleCI costs money, and using a legacy tool like Jenkins could take significant time to set up.

At CircleCI we live and breathe continuous integration and continuous deployment so we were pretty excited when Amazon Web Services (AWS) reached out to us with an early access preview of AWS CodeDeploy.

We are excited to announce that you now have more control over how often CircleCI emails you with per-project notification settings. By setting your email preferences, you’ll receive notifications only about the projects you care about, and you won’t have to wade through email notifications that you’d rather not see.

As anyone who has spent much time on the command line of a UNIX-based system knows, sudo is an incredibly powerful tool that allows you to temporarily perform actions as the “root” user, making a wide range of privileged actions possible.

CircleCI’s recently open-sourced frontend is built in ClojureScript using Om. Combining Clojure’s functional primitives and React’s programming model yields a uniquely powerful approach to user interfaces. Previously complex features, such as efficient undo, become trivially simple to implement. The simple versions turn out to be even more powerful. You don’t just get efficient undo, you also gain the ability to serialize the entire state of your application to inspect, debug, or reload! While the promise of snapshotting app state has been part of Om’s story from the beginning, we’ve been working hard to take the concept the rest of the way from idea to reality.

A quick monthly highlight of features we’ve been working on. As always, if you have questions or comments, we’d love to hear them. You can email us or tweet to us.

Rewrote the frontend to be much more stable and open-sourced it We rewrote our frontend in React.js/Om. We’ve seen a nice bump in stability – React’s component lifecycle events have made memory leaks a thing of the past. It’s now safe to leave a tab open overnight! The code is also open-source: please check it out and contribute at https://github.com/circleci/frontend.

Great news everybody, we’ve simplified our pricing to make it as transparent and easy to understand as possible! Here’s a quick summary:

• no more limits on projects

• no more limits on parallelism

• all plans are $19 for the first container and $50 for each additional container

• all customers are grandfathered in

If you’re interested in the specifics of the change and the thinking behind it, please read on.

A while ago I designed an interactive placeholder thing for our forms and wrote it entirely in CSS. I made it assuming no one would ever notice, so you can imagine my surprise when I saw that it got featured on LittleBigDetails, one of my favorite blogs!

We’ve just extended our build notifications support to Hall.com! Hall is beautifully designed group chat, IM and video chat for companies and teams.

CircleCI’s chat notifications help everyone on your team to stay up-to-date with your latest build status. When a build fails or passes, you can see which commit triggered the build and who was responsible for pushing the code to GitHub. It’s a great way to stay on top of what your collaborators are working on and to quickly notice and fix broken builds.

Heartbleed is a serious vulnerability in the SSL stack affecting a huge number of sites on the internet. In this post we address how we secured our servers in the wake of Heartbleed, and what actions customers should take to further protect themselves.

To commemorate our fresh new look, we have new CircleCI Stickers!

Want some of your own? Email jenneviere@circleci.com and we’ll send a few your way!

And in case you missed it, here’s how we came up with our new branding.

This is a story about how I built a compiler to automatically translate CircleCI’s 14,000 line test suite into another testing library, in about 24 hours.

CircleCI’s test suite is probably one of the larger in the Clojure world today. Our server-side code is 100% Clojure, including the test suite, which is currently 14,000 lines, in 140 files, with 5,000 assertions. Without parallelization, it takes 40 minutes to run.

tl;dr Typed Clojure is an important step for not just Clojure, but all dynamic languages. CircleCI is supporting it, and you should too.

Typed Clojure is one of the biggest advancements to dynamic programming languages in the last few decades. It shows that you can have the amazing flexibility of a dynamic language, while providing lightweight, optional typing. Most importantly, this can make your team more productive, and it’s ready to use in production.

Even if you don’t use Clojure, you should support the Typed Clojure campaign, because its success will help developers in your language realize how great optional typing can be in everyday code. Whether you write Ruby or Python or JavaScript or whatever, what we’re learning from Typed Clojure can be applied to your language.

Last week^H^H^H^Hmonth we had our first UX week, where we spent the entire week focused strictly1 on UX, especially on the front-end UI. It went great – we fixed dozens of little things, and a number of big things, that affect you using Circle every day.

Another new feature: build artifacts!

Quite a few of our users have added custom steps to the end of their builds to upload things like log files, coverage reports or deployment tarballs off the VMs for later consumption. This works okay, but it has some drawbacks – in particular, the need to insert upload credentials into the build, and that the uploaded artifacts aren’t linked from each build.

So we’ve made a feature of it! Now we can very easily save and link to any files created as part of your build. Here’s how it works: as part of your build, just write files into the $CIRCLE_ARTIFACTS directory. We’ll take it from there.

We’re having a UX week! We’re spending this entire week focusing strictly on UX, especially on our front-end UI.

We have a very iterative approach to shipping software. We try to ship a minimum viable version of features and iterate from there. This is great for responding quickly to customers, and having great support. However, it has led to us putting out some working but unintuitive UX, and much of it is still there.

We’re happy to announce a new feature: status badges!

tl;dr: https://circleci.com/gh/:owner/:repo.png?circle-token=:circle-token shows the pass/fail status of a repository, like this:

CircleCI is a platform for continuous delivery. This means (among other things) we’re building serious distributed systems: dozens of servers running thousands of builds across hundreds of “container” hosts, coordinating between all the moving parts, and taking care of all the low-level details so that you have the simplest, fastest continuous integration and deployment possible.

We’re growing! David Lowe is officially Circle’s first engineer.

David is also one the winners of the 2012 International Obfuscated C Code Competition. To introduce David, we thought we’d have him discuss his winning entry and how he made it.

Circle now has support for Flowdock! Some of our customers love it so much, they begged us to integrate Flowdock with Circle. If you haven’t used Flowdock, it is a combined group chat and inbox app for development teams featuring built-in integrations to email, GitHub, Pivotal Tracker, JIRA and others. Now, your Circle test results are displayed as well, so the entire team is quickly notified of build failures.

Setting up Circle and Flowdock is simple. Just edit the project through the Circle UI, enter your Flowdock API key, and you’re set. Circle will automatically send build results to your team inbox.

We’re proud to announce support for the GitHub Status API. If Circle is testing a repo, and you make a pull request, we will update the commit, and you’ll see something like:

Pull Request testing is live for all users, starting right now.

Testing is bullshit. I never signed up for this. I learned to code so I could make things, to make the world a better place. Instead I spend half my time writing tests.

I test because I have to, but it hurts. I know my site will fall apart if I don’t have tests, but that hurts more. Why hasn’t coding progressed to the point where we can quickly push code out to customers without double checking everything?