Speed performance with dev-friendly CI

The Challenge

The Gatsby framework is known for powering incredibly fast applications, and helping developers get “modern web tech without the headache.”

“The really cool appeal of Gatsby is obviously performance. That’s one of the biggest wins you get, but it also has a really great developer experience, and it uses some cool technologies like React, GraphQL, Node, and so on that developers really, really want to use,” said Dustin Schau, Software Engineer at Gatsby.

With a team focused on delivering speed and a fantastic developer experience to their community, they were looking for tools with a shared ethos of putting developers first. However, their previous CI solution was unreliable and didn’t report actionable feedback quickly enough for contributors. The Gatsby team wanted a CI solution that was reliable, quick, and robust.

The Solution

“When we started our transition to CircleCI, we thought we would just replicate what we had with our previous tool, and then we found that we can actually do a lot more on CircleCI. We originally started with only running unit tests and a few other checks. Now we run a full end-to-end test suite and a variety of real-world application tests. We use Cypress and CircleCI to run those, and it works really well.”

“Using CircleCI caused a marked jump in our confidence that we can merge our pull requests without breaking real Gatsby applications downstream.”

Why CircleCI

“When I first started at GatsbyJS, I preferred other CI tools. When I tried CircleCI on a whim, I realized how much more I could do and how much more intuitive CircleCI is. It’s very developer friendly because you can control your base images and create powerful workflows. The capabilities CircleCI puts in people’s hands makes it seem like you can build whatever you want, not just CI/CD. CircleCI is incredible. We’re super happy.”

About GatsbyJS

Gatsby is a free and open source framework based on React that helps developers build blazing fast websites and apps.