11 ms·

Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

304 points by kaycebasques 8y ago

fortytw2 8y ago
Also relevant - https://old.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/at3oyq/it_looks_like_ibera_is_gutting_travis_ci_just_a/egyh156/ https://old.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/at3oyq/it_looks_lik... "Yep. We were terminated by Idera without even our managers knowing." in wake of travis being acquired last month. https://blog.travis-ci.com/2019-01-23-travis-ci-joins-idera-inc https://blog.travis-ci.com/2019-01-23-travis-ci-joins-idera-...
- dominotw 8y ago
  > "Yep. We were terminated by Idera without even our managers knowing." Not sure if thats douchebaggy. I've seen several layoffs like this, where everyone finds out at the same time not by levels.
  - goobynight 8y ago
    You having seen it doesn't mean it isn't awful. Never mistake "common", or even "not rare", with "good" It also doesn't sound like everyone found out at the same time.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- michaelt 8y ago
  In the blog about the private equity acquisition, the CTO says "With the support from our new partners, we will be able to invest in expanding and improving our core product" I wonder if he believed that, even as he wrote it?
  - coldcode 8y ago
    It's complete BS, but for some reason C* people often don't understand how dumb this is, but for them it might mean a big payday so they don't care. The inherent knowledge walks out the door with the engineers, and all that is left is code and no knowledge. Hire cheap devs and before you realize it it becomes a write-off for the acquirer. Everyone wins except the people who worked hard to build it in the first place.
    - xsmasher 8y ago
      > all that is left is code and no knowledge The irony is that the better the engineering staff was, the better this works out for the firing company. If some newbies can pick up the code and quickly become productive, that's to the credit to the staff that was fired.
  - hinkley 8y ago
    My cynical side and bad experiences have taught me if the new guys are saying it it might be true. If the old owner is saying it, it might as well be a lie because they can't back it up even if they think they're being honest. When the new owners figure out what they actually want to do it's easy enough to get rid of the messenger. Either fire them or they leave in a huff.
mbrumlow 8y ago
I called it. The money men have praises Idera for their new and innovative approach to software development. Also know has fixed cost devlopement to the lowest bider. If you want stop this type of practice please don't sign multi year contracts. That is stage two. This is where they get their value. Without the contracts they can't use it as leverage to take out huge debts -- where they get their value from. If the fed raised the rates this practice would also end.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  There's a lot of problems to go around. If you're a founder, you're usually going to cash out for the right price. Everyone has their price. No one wants to grind forever. This isn't a problem if you're profitable enough that you can hold forever (Basecamp). If you're an investor, you're struggling for returns right now (to your point about interest rates and the Fed). You're going to squeeze whatever you can get your hands on as hard as possible (as an investor myself in real estate and small SaaS companies I've bought, I try very hard to not do this, but you're hedging against a multiple you paid for the asset; you don't want the asset's cashflow to disappear and watch your capital evaporate). Interest rates rising would help, but so would orgs more tilted towards employee ownership. You have to align incentives. Are you happy with a lifestyle business? (Not derogatory! I'd take a lifestyle business any day over any sort of possible unicorn status) Are your coworkers/shareholders? Would you customers be willing to be shareholders thereby becoming stakeholders? These problems are solvable with corporate structures and governance. Such a shame to see this happen. Great opportunity for GitLab and their CICD team though.
  - mbrumlow 8y ago
    This is not a investment. It is a tool for leverage. The goal is not to grow the company it's to get as many contracts as they can and lower the ebita. Once they do this they will take out huge loans for the next company to destroy. I don't blame the founders. But at the same time I think if enough of these deals for bad these types of investors will stop their bad practices. This sort of move not only hurts employees. It hurts those who use the product too. It's a net bad for everybody but a few. I am still digging into how these things work and how the money gets out. But I would not be surprised if sometime in the future this sort of business engineering would be made illegal. Look what PE did to solar winds and general dollar. Both had huge piles of cash and were drained and put back on the market for the general public to pay the debt.
garblegarble 8y ago
Previous discussion of the acquisition on HN, complete with a prediction of just this happening can be found at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251
venantius 8y ago
Honestly I'm astonished at the speed with which this happened, given the recency of their acquisition. Seems amazingly cynical of their new parent company.
- brianwawok 8y ago
  PE firms are there for profit. To make profit you cut costs or raise revenue. Guess which is faster?
  - Rapzid 8y ago
    I worked at a company that was completely turned around by PE. Improved culture, employee happiness, expanded business, etc. They were in it for the flip sure, but there are different models for achieving this. It's not always a chop shop job.
xtreak29 8y ago
From the tweet [0] it seems there is going to be a huge tech debt. I don't know how Idera is planning to expand upon the acquisition after letting go people like this. > Some know the skinny on dozens of different open source projects and ecosystems, others understand run time and dep mgmt for like 17 languages and even more tooling, and automated image mastering to handle it all. > Others are rewriting what it means to manage communities in this era. They had to garden github issue repos with 1000s of tickets and find the patterns, and know a wide swath of the open source community in ways most people will never get to again [0] https://mobile.twitter.com/carmatrocity/status/1098538650525188096 https://mobile.twitter.com/carmatrocity/status/1098538650525...
- lostapathy 8y ago
  To (sadly) be fair, Travis has already been struggling mightily with tech debt the last few years. There have been a lot of issues surface and re-surface that sure seem like they shouldn't be a big deal. For example, setting a build to use ruby 2.4 is supposed to run the latest ruby 2.4.x, but would frequently build against ancient, unsupported rubies for a while, before being silently fixed.
  - mikepurvis 8y ago
    They've also been very slow to ship updated machine images— Ubuntu 14.04 wasn't available until late 2015, and 16.04 wasn't until Nov 2018: https://blog.travis-ci.com/2015-10-14-opening-up-ubuntu-trusty-beta https://blog.travis-ci.com/2015-10-14-opening-up-ubuntu-trus... https://blog.travis-ci.com/2018-11-08-xenial-release https://blog.travis-ci.com/2018-11-08-xenial-release The extremely long lag combined with some communications from Travis developers on related Github issues strongly implied that shipping these was a highly manual process, not just a matter of updating a few Packer configs and calling it a day. I'm not arguing that it's trivial, but it should have been a week or two of effort at most. Now, lots of their userbase could be covered by using docker environments, or by the natural isolation supplied by the language platform (virtualenv, rbenv, etc), but at the end of the day, it's frustrating if your CI environment is drifting away from what developers are actually using themselves.
maccio92 8y ago
maybe they wouldn't have been laid off if they took themselves and their work more seriously? I mean honestly, looking at the team page at https://about.travis-ci.com/team/ https://about.travis-ci.com/team/, we have titles such as Mermaid on board, Tyranjasaurus Specs, Tortilla Builder, Sausage Dog Wrangler, Customer Avocado, Head Catwoman, and Conjurer of Avocado Patronuses
- samtho 8y ago
  Really? Bullshit titles (which are already not taken seriously in tech circles) are the reason? This seems to be a bit of an asinine assumption given their success and track-record.
- guitarbill 8y ago
  Because everything business has to have a super serious appearance, and we should judge people on image, and not actions or the output of their work? Or because a bit of whimsy is too much for miserable people?
  - mmmmmmmmm 8y ago
    Their actions and output were subpar. That's why they're losing market share and losing their jobs. I would expect making a joke of your job title is endemic of people who don't take their work seriously.
  - rleigh 8y ago
    It's not about whimsy being "too much". It's that it conveys an unprofessional and immature image, which may result in people taking their business elsewhere. I too looked at this page a few years back. And I was not impressed. I wouldn't find it appropriate for e.g. a medical company which does "serious" stuff to very rigourous levels of quality controlled design and verification. But equally I don't think it's appropriate for this company either. Maybe a games company which is focussed upon making things which are fun. I think we will have to agree to disagree on its appropriateness. As for judging people based on their actions and output. It took them over two and a half years to update their images for Ubuntu 16.04. Where are the Ubuntu 18.04 images? It's nearly a year already. Maybe I'd have a better impression if they could maintain their service to an acceptable standard. As it is, this lack of timeliness was a huge letdown, and cause endless frustration and setbacks on the teams I worked on who depended upon these images being up to date and not full of incompatible language and tool versions.
westoque 8y ago
There was a time when I wanted to use Travis CI but the pricing was too much. Then, CircleCI came along with a free plan, and when the time came to upgrade, we did it so easily since we’re already invested in the platform. I wish Travis CI they did this from the start since I like their platform and had some open source projects there and again could have easily upgraded. This is where the fremium model would have worked.
- lmm 8y ago
  Huh? Travis has had a free level for a while (I've been using it for my libraries on github).
  - penagwin 8y ago
    Only for open source repo's. For those who have to choose a CI for business use that may not be usable.
    - YawningAngel 8y ago
      In what sane business is 50$ a month over a free tier the deciding factor in choosing a CI system?
      - LocalPCGuy 8y ago
        When the offering itself is practically identical.
      - rightbyte 8y ago
        Most (?) developers can't even buy a mouse without prior permission. "Free" is more convient at work than at home. If I need something at home I just pay. At work ... Compare the hazzle of getting a Win10 VM up and running compared to a Ubuntu one with licensing issues. A Win10 image is like 3 days away. An Ubuntu 30 min. The slower alternative also happens to cost money.
        8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
I hope no one minds a quick plug... sourcehut has a build service with a comparible UX to Travis CI, but more powerful in some respects. https://sourcehut.org https://sourcehut.org Get in touch if you want some tips on moving from Travis to builds.sr.ht. I wish I could hire some of the recently unemployed, but I just don't have the budget. If you want me to circulate your resumes in Philly, feel free to email them to me. Best of luck.
- myWindoonn 8y ago
  This is a bait-and-switch for most of us who are used to free Travis service, as your offering is not free.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
    Well, during the alpha it's free, but you're right that it will eventually require payment. But the incentives are better this way anyway: if it were free then in a few years we could very well be having this conversation in the wake of layoffs at sourcehut following an aquisition. Sourcehut isn't based on the VC grow-until-you-burst model. If you pay for your account, you can be confident it's sustainable and aligned with your interests. Also, if anyone has trouble affording an account, please send me an email. I don't want anyone to be left out because they can't afford the subscription fee, we'll sort something out.
  - bostonvaulter2 8y ago
    He's not obligated to provide a free service. He's trying to run a business here.
- jrochkind1 8y ago
  "comparable UX to travis" is enticing to me, as I am fond of travis. Where do I find pricing information? (Was hoping for the standard "Pricing" link). Does it require a repo hosted on sourehut too, or can the CI be used independently?
  - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
siwatanejo 8y ago
If anyone has experience in snap/flatpak, msg me: andrew.forsure@gmail.com I'm hiring for remote positions
urda 8y ago
Whelp, I might be looking at CircleCI vs TravisCI again.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
  You should have already been doing this, before the acquisition. It felt like Travis had been on auto-pilot for a long time. It was painfully obvious to me and our team that Circle is actually hungry and constantly innovating and wanted our business. We moved one project to Circle, waited a bit, and then moved everything away from Travis. Don't regret it one bit.
  - urda 8y ago
    Hard to want to keep updating your working CI solution for your open source stuff while holding down a job and life and everything else. :)
    - eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
      Hah agreed :) We had one project that kept breaking in Travis, and we started to realize that starting over in Circle was easier than the troubleshooting / feedback loop in Travis.
    - bd82 8y ago
      I kept putting of switching from Travis to Circle-CI in one of my open source projects, But when I did get around to it the whole thing went pretty smoothly and easily and I regret not doing it earlier. 1.The builds are much faster now. 2. The configuration has virtually no hacks anymore as I'm using Circle-CI own docker images (including browsers). 3. And the UI/UX is superior as well.
  - Rapzid 8y ago
    I got stuck as soon as I found out CircleCI didn't scrub secrets from the log automatically like TravisCI. I know, I know, but we have a pretty hefty legacy OSS build in place and that's a lot to shore up before go time haha. Need to check back on that feature request...
jrochkind1 8y ago
Not too shocking, unfortunately, from discussion when the acquisition was annoucned (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251), we knew that this was the kind of private equity firm that makes money by buying products with existing revenue streams, and then _not_ investing in them. (And the corollary, laying off staff you don't need if you're not going to be investing in it, obviously helps your profit margin). This is kind of how private equity works. It is sad, I had really liked travis as a product, I don't expect I will be able to continue to. Travis is just _so easy_ to set up for my basic ruby gem and Rails app projects (I don't want to spend time on setting up CI, I just want it to be done), as well as free for open source -- none of it's competitors have seemed to give me that when I looked before. Travis, by offering an absolutely brain-dead setup, and giving it away free to open source, really created a revolution in actually doing CI for open source, at least in ruby. Everyone's doing CI now, when few open source projects were before in ruby. That anyone offers free CI for open source at all is probably due to the need to compete with travis. I wonder if it'll stick around.
- FanaHOVA 8y ago
  Always used Circle in my Rails app, works very nicely (even though the web experience has been going downhill a little bit lately).
- simonbyrne 8y ago
  Agree 100%. Free CI really did provide a massive boost to collaborative open source projects. As a user, it did a lot to increase software quality: not just catching inadvertent bugs, but also ensuring that there was at least some reproducible way to get the code working, that didn't depend on some implicit configuration of the authors system. As a maintainer, accepting simple pull requests becomes much easier when you can quickly look over the code and check the CI status, and not have to try it out locally yourself. It was certainly critical to the "social coding" idea behind GitHub. So thanks to the team that put it together. Even if the product you built doesn't live on in the way you hoped, it has certainly had a lasting impact for the better on the open source world.
Waterluvian 8y ago
I've worked somewhere where it was taking so much effort getting Jenkins set up. In the long run it would be better, but I couldn't wait months and months for the stuff that I got working in maybe 20 minutes with a .travis.yml file. Disappointing to see this happen. I like devops stuff that covers 80% of your need with 20% of the work.
alper 8y ago
I’ve reluctantly used Travis for the last years and hardly seen new features or long standing open bugs being fixed. Not sure what the people were doing but this seems typical for a Ruby project.
endymi0n 8y ago
Sorry to the Travis engineers, in case you don‘t have any other plans already, at JustWatch, we‘re hiring just around the corner :)
hatchnyc 8y ago
I would guess that this strategy would be more effective in an industry where the people with the most influence over vendor selection were not seeing this story at the top of all their news feeds.
- joshdick 8y ago
  Yeah, it's hard to imagine myself ever recommending my company buy TravisCI now.
devhead 8y ago
I've been using travis Enterprise for over two years and what has kept that going has been the amazing support and development team at Travis who have always helped us during an emergency, been very responsive and informative in all our interactions. They are the reasons I have backlogged the project to migrate. Keys issues i've seen in our Enterprise install... * Upgrades can go bad, very quickly and very silently. * Build images are out-dated, missing security patches, bloated, and not easily provisioned with custom features to integrate our tools with theirs. * no tooling for docker builds/deployments * long start up time on the build images. * Enterprise documentation (though it's been improved a lot recently) Best of luck to #travisAlums, I hope you get picked up quickly.
- nojvek 8y ago
  We’re on a custom plan and pay them quite a bit every month. However after their acquisition, their support is basically non-existent in responses. We’re migrating to in-house Jenkins now. Can’t trust third parties to handle critical infra. I was a big pusher for Travis, but they’ve lost my trust. I would advice everyone else to migrate off and mitigate their risk.
jsmeaton 8y ago
Has anyone got a link to a decent migration guide from Travis to circleci? And I’d Circle don’t have one they’re leaving lots of money on the table.
- jsmeaton 8y ago
  https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/migrating-from-travis/ https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/migrating-from-travis/ has a basic migration guide, but doesn't discuss services like databases or caches.
yakdriver 8y ago
More background on Idera: https://medium.com/@dirk.avery/r-i-p-travis-ci-347753c73775 https://medium.com/@dirk.avery/r-i-p-travis-ci-347753c73775

304 points by kaycebasques 8y ago

Also relevant - https://old.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/at3oyq/it_looks_like_ibera_is_gutting_travis_ci_just_a/egyh156/ https://old.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/at3oyq/it_looks_lik... "Yep. We were terminated by Idera without even our managers knowing." in wake of travis being acquired last month. https://blog.travis-ci.com/2019-01-23-travis-ci-joins-idera-inc https://blog.travis-ci.com/2019-01-23-travis-ci-joins-idera-...

dominotw 8y ago
> "Yep. We were terminated by Idera without even our managers knowing." Not sure if thats douchebaggy. I've seen several layoffs like this, where everyone finds out at the same time not by levels.
- goobynight 8y ago
  You having seen it doesn't mean it isn't awful. Never mistake "common", or even "not rare", with "good" It also doesn't sound like everyone found out at the same time.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
michaelt 8y ago
In the blog about the private equity acquisition, the CTO says "With the support from our new partners, we will be able to invest in expanding and improving our core product" I wonder if he believed that, even as he wrote it?
- coldcode 8y ago
  It's complete BS, but for some reason C* people often don't understand how dumb this is, but for them it might mean a big payday so they don't care. The inherent knowledge walks out the door with the engineers, and all that is left is code and no knowledge. Hire cheap devs and before you realize it it becomes a write-off for the acquirer. Everyone wins except the people who worked hard to build it in the first place.
  - xsmasher 8y ago
    > all that is left is code and no knowledge The irony is that the better the engineering staff was, the better this works out for the firing company. If some newbies can pick up the code and quickly become productive, that's to the credit to the staff that was fired.
- hinkley 8y ago
  My cynical side and bad experiences have taught me if the new guys are saying it it might be true. If the old owner is saying it, it might as well be a lie because they can't back it up even if they think they're being honest. When the new owners figure out what they actually want to do it's easy enough to get rid of the messenger. Either fire them or they leave in a huff.

mbrumlow 8y ago

I called it. The money men have praises Idera for their new and innovative approach to software development. Also know has fixed cost devlopement to the lowest bider. If you want stop this type of practice please don't sign multi year contracts. That is stage two. This is where they get their value. Without the contracts they can't use it as leverage to take out huge debts -- where they get their value from. If the fed raised the rates this practice would also end.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
There's a lot of problems to go around. If you're a founder, you're usually going to cash out for the right price. Everyone has their price. No one wants to grind forever. This isn't a problem if you're profitable enough that you can hold forever (Basecamp). If you're an investor, you're struggling for returns right now (to your point about interest rates and the Fed). You're going to squeeze whatever you can get your hands on as hard as possible (as an investor myself in real estate and small SaaS companies I've bought, I try very hard to not do this, but you're hedging against a multiple you paid for the asset; you don't want the asset's cashflow to disappear and watch your capital evaporate). Interest rates rising would help, but so would orgs more tilted towards employee ownership. You have to align incentives. Are you happy with a lifestyle business? (Not derogatory! I'd take a lifestyle business any day over any sort of possible unicorn status) Are your coworkers/shareholders? Would you customers be willing to be shareholders thereby becoming stakeholders? These problems are solvable with corporate structures and governance. Such a shame to see this happen. Great opportunity for GitLab and their CICD team though.
- mbrumlow 8y ago
  This is not a investment. It is a tool for leverage. The goal is not to grow the company it's to get as many contracts as they can and lower the ebita. Once they do this they will take out huge loans for the next company to destroy. I don't blame the founders. But at the same time I think if enough of these deals for bad these types of investors will stop their bad practices. This sort of move not only hurts employees. It hurts those who use the product too. It's a net bad for everybody but a few. I am still digging into how these things work and how the money gets out. But I would not be surprised if sometime in the future this sort of business engineering would be made illegal. Look what PE did to solar winds and general dollar. Both had huge piles of cash and were drained and put back on the market for the general public to pay the debt.

garblegarble 8y ago

Previous discussion of the acquisition on HN, complete with a prediction of just this happening can be found at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251

venantius 8y ago

Honestly I'm astonished at the speed with which this happened, given the recency of their acquisition. Seems amazingly cynical of their new parent company.

brianwawok 8y ago
PE firms are there for profit. To make profit you cut costs or raise revenue. Guess which is faster?
- Rapzid 8y ago
  I worked at a company that was completely turned around by PE. Improved culture, employee happiness, expanded business, etc. They were in it for the flip sure, but there are different models for achieving this. It's not always a chop shop job.

xtreak29 8y ago

From the tweet [0] it seems there is going to be a huge tech debt. I don't know how Idera is planning to expand upon the acquisition after letting go people like this. > Some know the skinny on dozens of different open source projects and ecosystems, others understand run time and dep mgmt for like 17 languages and even more tooling, and automated image mastering to handle it all. > Others are rewriting what it means to manage communities in this era. They had to garden github issue repos with 1000s of tickets and find the patterns, and know a wide swath of the open source community in ways most people will never get to again [0] https://mobile.twitter.com/carmatrocity/status/1098538650525188096 https://mobile.twitter.com/carmatrocity/status/1098538650525...

lostapathy 8y ago
To (sadly) be fair, Travis has already been struggling mightily with tech debt the last few years. There have been a lot of issues surface and re-surface that sure seem like they shouldn't be a big deal. For example, setting a build to use ruby 2.4 is supposed to run the latest ruby 2.4.x, but would frequently build against ancient, unsupported rubies for a while, before being silently fixed.
- mikepurvis 8y ago
  They've also been very slow to ship updated machine images— Ubuntu 14.04 wasn't available until late 2015, and 16.04 wasn't until Nov 2018: https://blog.travis-ci.com/2015-10-14-opening-up-ubuntu-trusty-beta https://blog.travis-ci.com/2015-10-14-opening-up-ubuntu-trus... https://blog.travis-ci.com/2018-11-08-xenial-release https://blog.travis-ci.com/2018-11-08-xenial-release The extremely long lag combined with some communications from Travis developers on related Github issues strongly implied that shipping these was a highly manual process, not just a matter of updating a few Packer configs and calling it a day. I'm not arguing that it's trivial, but it should have been a week or two of effort at most. Now, lots of their userbase could be covered by using docker environments, or by the natural isolation supplied by the language platform (virtualenv, rbenv, etc), but at the end of the day, it's frustrating if your CI environment is drifting away from what developers are actually using themselves.

maccio92 8y ago

maybe they wouldn't have been laid off if they took themselves and their work more seriously? I mean honestly, looking at the team page at https://about.travis-ci.com/team/ https://about.travis-ci.com/team/, we have titles such as Mermaid on board, Tyranjasaurus Specs, Tortilla Builder, Sausage Dog Wrangler, Customer Avocado, Head Catwoman, and Conjurer of Avocado Patronuses

samtho 8y ago
Really? Bullshit titles (which are already not taken seriously in tech circles) are the reason? This seems to be a bit of an asinine assumption given their success and track-record.
guitarbill 8y ago
Because everything business has to have a super serious appearance, and we should judge people on image, and not actions or the output of their work? Or because a bit of whimsy is too much for miserable people?
- mmmmmmmmm 8y ago
  Their actions and output were subpar. That's why they're losing market share and losing their jobs. I would expect making a joke of your job title is endemic of people who don't take their work seriously.
- rleigh 8y ago
  It's not about whimsy being "too much". It's that it conveys an unprofessional and immature image, which may result in people taking their business elsewhere. I too looked at this page a few years back. And I was not impressed. I wouldn't find it appropriate for e.g. a medical company which does "serious" stuff to very rigourous levels of quality controlled design and verification. But equally I don't think it's appropriate for this company either. Maybe a games company which is focussed upon making things which are fun. I think we will have to agree to disagree on its appropriateness. As for judging people based on their actions and output. It took them over two and a half years to update their images for Ubuntu 16.04. Where are the Ubuntu 18.04 images? It's nearly a year already. Maybe I'd have a better impression if they could maintain their service to an acceptable standard. As it is, this lack of timeliness was a huge letdown, and cause endless frustration and setbacks on the teams I worked on who depended upon these images being up to date and not full of incompatible language and tool versions.

westoque 8y ago

There was a time when I wanted to use Travis CI but the pricing was too much. Then, CircleCI came along with a free plan, and when the time came to upgrade, we did it so easily since we’re already invested in the platform. I wish Travis CI they did this from the start since I like their platform and had some open source projects there and again could have easily upgraded. This is where the fremium model would have worked.

lmm 8y ago
Huh? Travis has had a free level for a while (I've been using it for my libraries on github).
- penagwin 8y ago
  Only for open source repo's. For those who have to choose a CI for business use that may not be usable.
  - YawningAngel 8y ago
    In what sane business is 50$ a month over a free tier the deciding factor in choosing a CI system?
    - LocalPCGuy 8y ago
      When the offering itself is practically identical.
    - rightbyte 8y ago
      Most (?) developers can't even buy a mouse without prior permission. "Free" is more convient at work than at home. If I need something at home I just pay. At work ... Compare the hazzle of getting a Win10 VM up and running compared to a Ubuntu one with licensing issues. A Win10 image is like 3 days away. An Ubuntu 30 min. The slower alternative also happens to cost money.
      - 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago

I hope no one minds a quick plug... sourcehut has a build service with a comparible UX to Travis CI, but more powerful in some respects. https://sourcehut.org https://sourcehut.org Get in touch if you want some tips on moving from Travis to builds.sr.ht. I wish I could hire some of the recently unemployed, but I just don't have the budget. If you want me to circulate your resumes in Philly, feel free to email them to me. Best of luck.

myWindoonn 8y ago
This is a bait-and-switch for most of us who are used to free Travis service, as your offering is not free.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  Well, during the alpha it's free, but you're right that it will eventually require payment. But the incentives are better this way anyway: if it were free then in a few years we could very well be having this conversation in the wake of layoffs at sourcehut following an aquisition. Sourcehut isn't based on the VC grow-until-you-burst model. If you pay for your account, you can be confident it's sustainable and aligned with your interests. Also, if anyone has trouble affording an account, please send me an email. I don't want anyone to be left out because they can't afford the subscription fee, we'll sort something out.
- bostonvaulter2 8y ago
  He's not obligated to provide a free service. He's trying to run a business here.
jrochkind1 8y ago
"comparable UX to travis" is enticing to me, as I am fond of travis. Where do I find pricing information? (Was hoping for the standard "Pricing" link). Does it require a repo hosted on sourehut too, or can the CI be used independently?
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago

siwatanejo 8y ago

If anyone has experience in snap/flatpak, msg me: andrew.forsure@gmail.com I'm hiring for remote positions

urda 8y ago

Whelp, I might be looking at CircleCI vs TravisCI again.

eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
You should have already been doing this, before the acquisition. It felt like Travis had been on auto-pilot for a long time. It was painfully obvious to me and our team that Circle is actually hungry and constantly innovating and wanted our business. We moved one project to Circle, waited a bit, and then moved everything away from Travis. Don't regret it one bit.
- urda 8y ago
  Hard to want to keep updating your working CI solution for your open source stuff while holding down a job and life and everything else. :)
  - eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
    Hah agreed :) We had one project that kept breaking in Travis, and we started to realize that starting over in Circle was easier than the troubleshooting / feedback loop in Travis.
  - bd82 8y ago
    I kept putting of switching from Travis to Circle-CI in one of my open source projects, But when I did get around to it the whole thing went pretty smoothly and easily and I regret not doing it earlier. 1.The builds are much faster now. 2. The configuration has virtually no hacks anymore as I'm using Circle-CI own docker images (including browsers). 3. And the UI/UX is superior as well.
- Rapzid 8y ago
  I got stuck as soon as I found out CircleCI didn't scrub secrets from the log automatically like TravisCI. I know, I know, but we have a pretty hefty legacy OSS build in place and that's a lot to shore up before go time haha. Need to check back on that feature request...

jrochkind1 8y ago

Not too shocking, unfortunately, from discussion when the acquisition was annoucned (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251), we knew that this was the kind of private equity firm that makes money by buying products with existing revenue streams, and then _not_ investing in them. (And the corollary, laying off staff you don't need if you're not going to be investing in it, obviously helps your profit margin). This is kind of how private equity works. It is sad, I had really liked travis as a product, I don't expect I will be able to continue to. Travis is just _so easy_ to set up for my basic ruby gem and Rails app projects (I don't want to spend time on setting up CI, I just want it to be done), as well as free for open source -- none of it's competitors have seemed to give me that when I looked before. Travis, by offering an absolutely brain-dead setup, and giving it away free to open source, really created a revolution in actually doing CI for open source, at least in ruby. Everyone's doing CI now, when few open source projects were before in ruby. That anyone offers free CI for open source at all is probably due to the need to compete with travis. I wonder if it'll stick around.

FanaHOVA 8y ago
Always used Circle in my Rails app, works very nicely (even though the web experience has been going downhill a little bit lately).
simonbyrne 8y ago
Agree 100%. Free CI really did provide a massive boost to collaborative open source projects. As a user, it did a lot to increase software quality: not just catching inadvertent bugs, but also ensuring that there was at least some reproducible way to get the code working, that didn't depend on some implicit configuration of the authors system. As a maintainer, accepting simple pull requests becomes much easier when you can quickly look over the code and check the CI status, and not have to try it out locally yourself. It was certainly critical to the "social coding" idea behind GitHub. So thanks to the team that put it together. Even if the product you built doesn't live on in the way you hoped, it has certainly had a lasting impact for the better on the open source world.

Waterluvian 8y ago

I've worked somewhere where it was taking so much effort getting Jenkins set up. In the long run it would be better, but I couldn't wait months and months for the stuff that I got working in maybe 20 minutes with a .travis.yml file. Disappointing to see this happen. I like devops stuff that covers 80% of your need with 20% of the work.

alper 8y ago

I’ve reluctantly used Travis for the last years and hardly seen new features or long standing open bugs being fixed. Not sure what the people were doing but this seems typical for a Ruby project.

endymi0n 8y ago

Sorry to the Travis engineers, in case you don‘t have any other plans already, at JustWatch, we‘re hiring just around the corner :)

hatchnyc 8y ago

I would guess that this strategy would be more effective in an industry where the people with the most influence over vendor selection were not seeing this story at the top of all their news feeds.

joshdick 8y ago
Yeah, it's hard to imagine myself ever recommending my company buy TravisCI now.

devhead 8y ago

I've been using travis Enterprise for over two years and what has kept that going has been the amazing support and development team at Travis who have always helped us during an emergency, been very responsive and informative in all our interactions. They are the reasons I have backlogged the project to migrate. Keys issues i've seen in our Enterprise install... * Upgrades can go bad, very quickly and very silently. * Build images are out-dated, missing security patches, bloated, and not easily provisioned with custom features to integrate our tools with theirs. * no tooling for docker builds/deployments * long start up time on the build images. * Enterprise documentation (though it's been improved a lot recently) Best of luck to #travisAlums, I hope you get picked up quickly.

nojvek 8y ago
We’re on a custom plan and pay them quite a bit every month. However after their acquisition, their support is basically non-existent in responses. We’re migrating to in-house Jenkins now. Can’t trust third parties to handle critical infra. I was a big pusher for Travis, but they’ve lost my trust. I would advice everyone else to migrate off and mitigate their risk.

jsmeaton 8y ago

Has anyone got a link to a decent migration guide from Travis to circleci? And I’d Circle don’t have one they’re leaving lots of money on the table.

jsmeaton 8y ago
https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/migrating-from-travis/ https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/migrating-from-travis/ has a basic migration guide, but doesn't discuss services like databases or caches.

yakdriver 8y ago

More background on Idera: https://medium.com/@dirk.avery/r-i-p-travis-ci-347753c73775 https://medium.com/@dirk.avery/r-i-p-travis-ci-347753c73775