Moshi saves hundreds of hours on builds yearly by using CircleCI

For the Moshi app, which launched in 2017 to help children improve their sleep and emotional wellness, keeping content and features fresh is essential to the success of the business. The app has played an important role during the COVID-19 pandemic, with remote schooling and family stress accelerating the need for kids’ rest, calm, and emotional control.

Moshi’s app developers are eager to keep the app continually updated so that children, parents, and teachers can benefit from new content and features. In Moshi’s early days, developers used fastlane and Jenkins to build applications locally.

“Every time we had to switch contexts or pull in a new branch, we’d have to wait for it to build and developers couldn’t do anything for 20 minutes,” says Enzo Belli, Senior Android Developer at Moshi. “We wanted to send multiple builds a day, but we couldn’t because the process was too slow.”

“The automation is so smooth, CircleCI has vastly improved the way we work and our whole team’s productivity. We’re quicker to get through tickets and validate our builds. Without CircleCI, we’d be pushed back to the Stone Age. Today there’s no wasted time.”

Enzo Belli
Senior Android Developer at Moshi

Speeding up development end-to-end

Moshi adopted CircleCI for app development in 2017 and expanded its use to mobile app development in 2021. The development team relies on Agile development processes, working on two-week sprints under a project manager. With CircleCI’s automation powering their efforts, Moshi developers meet daily or twice-daily targets.

“With full automation, the end-to-end process is much quicker,” Belli says. “There are no bottlenecks when sending builds to QA.” The speed is evident even with development taking place across Java, Kotlin, iOS, JavaScript, and TypeScript, Belli adds.

“The automation is so smooth,” Belli says. “CircleCI has vastly improved the way we work and our whole team’s productivity. We’re quicker to get through tickets and validate our builds. Without CircleCI, we’d be pushed back to the Stone Age. Today there’s no wasted time.”

Hundreds of hours of dev time saved yearly

With CircleCI, Moshi’s developers save 20 minutes per build per platform, equaling hundreds of hours saved yearly. Using CircleCI features such as Android and Slack orbs, the developers can now build several times a day, instead of just once a day. Tracking the velocity of sprints across projects is key, which is why developers use CircleCI’s Insights dashboard to examine the highs and lows of sprints and to query how often they are releasing.

Adopting CI/CD workflows with CircleCI helps Moshi meet goals for updating and improving the app but it also helps the engineering team generate positive results for parents who rely on Moshi to improve their children’s lives.

“Software engineering can be about much more than the P&L,” Belli says. “Working so successfully within a meaningful space gives the developers a potent reason to serve a greater good.”

Benefits since using CircleCI

• 20 minutes saved per build per platform
• Automation saves hundreds hours of development time yearly
• Builds are now several times daily
  
  

About Moshi

Moshi is a mindfulness app for kids with meditations that help them reset, focus, gain self control and confidence, take proactive vs reactive approaches, and learn SEL skills like social awareness, self-management, and responsible decision-making.