Improved Developer Productivity

Why CircleCI?

Uniplaces is the fastest-growing international online marketplace for booking student accommodation with thousands of verified properties. Since launching in 2013, Uniplaces has helped over 10,000 students, from over 165 countries, book one of over 30,000 verified places. CircleCI has helped the Uniplaces team improve their workflow since early 2015.

“With our last CI solution, we had all the unnecessary work of hosting, configuring, and extending our own server. With CircleCI we don’t have to spend a single thought on CI infrastructure or maintenance, it’s just there and does the job.”

Peter Tilsen
CTO at Uniplaces

The Challenge Prior to CircleCI

Before CircleCI, we used Jenkins. Jenkins is great but it’s not software as a service [SaaS]. We had all the unnecessary work of hosting, configuring, and extending our own server. CircleCI is clearly defined to be a continuous integrations platform, and that’s exactly what it is. No useless overhead.

The Solution

We chose CircleCI because we believe in the power of SaaS. CircleCI was performant, easy to integrate with and simple to configure. I loved the scalability and load distribution feature.

With CircleCI, we are able to have a stable and reliable partner in terms of quality assurance and integration flows. CircleCI makes it possible to run all our tests triggered by every push or pull request. Running our tests locally was not an alternative because of the runtime duration and the impact on productivity. Because of its seamless integration with GitHub, all of our engineers can quickly see that status of our test runs and tech leads. Our code owners never integrate any branch before seeing a “green light” from CircleCI.

Productivity for our team became much easier because we were able to extract and outsource yet another part of our responsibilities. With CircleCI we don’t have to spend a single thought on CI infrastructure or maintenance, it’s just there and does the job.

“When running into performance troubles, adding new containers was a piece of cake. Every issue that I came across was quickly solvable, even when I needed technical support from the CircleCI team. The initial configuration was just a charm.”

Peter Tilsen
CTO at Uniplaces

About Uniplaces

Uniplaces is a Lisbon-based startup that is creating a trusted, global brand for student accommodation. Since launching in 2012, Uniplaces has become the fastest-growing international website for booking student accommodation: it currently operates in 9 countries (UK, Spain, France, Portugal, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, and Germany) and is planning to roll out across Europe. Uniplaces has been making the process of finding accommodation easier for students and providing landlords with an easy way to rent their accommodation online to students from all over the world. Uniplaces works closely with universities and professional accommodation providers.