6 ms·

Earned my upvote because this is indeed a nice deal and probably tons of effort went into creating this kind of relationship with that many companies. However,

by pestaa 13y ago

Earned my upvote because this is indeed a nice deal and probably tons of effort went into creating this kind of relationship with that many companies. However, am I the only one who enjoys setting up Graphite and CI and similar software? (No email, though. Did it once, and don't want to give up sleeping time for a week to do it again.)

pbiggar 13y ago
[disclaimer: I work at CircleCI, which is in the Bundle]. Good question! I think a lot of devs get therapeutic enjoyment from setting up CI. It starts out as fun for the first few hours, while everything is new and exciting. However, it turns to disdain very quickly when: - you need to remember how to set up postgres/rvm/lucene again - you need to add a 2nd server and realize you now need to manage a cluster (and you didn't automate the first one!) - you're away on vacation with your family, and someone calls you because the company CI server is down - you realize the tests run too slowly and now need to figure out how to make them faster - you get a bad performance review because of all the valuable engineer time you're wasting managing the CI server, which you could have outsourced for a fraction of the price - you wonder how you turned into "the build guy" when you actually signed on to make great products. These are the sort of problems that hosted CI like https://circleci.com https://circleci.com solve for you :)
- olalonde 13y ago
  For some reason I keep getting targeted by your ads. I guess I must have searched too much Jenkins related stuff recently. Unfortunately I don't think our tiny startup can justify a monthly expense for CI at the moment. Great ads by the way!
  - pbiggar 13y ago
    Sounds like you should buy the hackerbundle and get 3 months free! ;)
    - jtheory 13y ago
      But that assumes that the tiny startup is either confident that, only 3 short months from now, they'll be able to spring for the full price of hosted CI, OR they can afford the time investment to set up their whole build process in hosted CI... and then spend the time to migrate away from it into a local setup before the 3 months is up. There's quite a bit more than the money involved when setting up SaaS infrastructure; even if the first 3 months were _sponsored_, the precious time invested would be wasted if they aren't signing up for the long haul. And if they are signing up for the long haul, then 3 months of X discount makes very little difference in the calculation.
      - pbiggar 13y ago
        CircleCI costs $19 a month for a small startup (I know it says $49 value, but really small startups will be fine on a smaller plan). That's a lot cheaper than buying a server, just in raw costs, not even taking account developer time to set this up (much cheaper than setting it up locally on Jenkins). If your tiny startup isn't able to afford a couple of hundred dollars a month for various hosted services after 3 months, then you're prioritizing wrong. You need to focus on building a valuable product and getting it to customers, not on building your own internal setup to save a little bit of money. Companies doing the former are much more likely to succeed than those doing the latter.
        jtheory 13y ago
        It's not my startup under discussion, actually (I wasn't the first commenter above), but to be fair the first choice for a tiny startup might well be "stick with the shell scripts and dead-simple architecture for now" rather than any CI at all, hosted or not. Thanks for putting up the more relevant comparison price point, though, and I do agree with you that outsourcing non-core functions is essential to getting real work done on the actual product.
        pbiggar 13y ago
        Sure, I meant in the general case. I hope the $19 price point is low enough to encourage folks not to do it with shell scripts :)
- philsnow 13y ago
  > you're away on vacation with your family, and someone calls you because company the CI server is down This is a general problem with any kind of maintenance or setup that you might do. Did you write a diary of how you went about setting it up ? Did you communicate to the rest of your team how it's supposed to work / how you suspect it might break ? If not, don't be _too_ surprised to be The One Person who gets called about that thing.
  - pbiggar 13y ago
    This is one of the reason we favour hosted services as much as possible. If the rest of the team has account on the service, you can likely solve your problems without relying on a single person.
- drdaeman 13y ago
  > you need to remember ${process} again That's why sysadmins should be encouraged to never configure systems directly, but use write-apply-observe-refine cycle of Puppet/Chef (or alike) declarative configurations. Sounds like a hassle (and sometimes it is, especially in cases where to-be-configured software has Turing-complete configuration files), but in my own experience actually proved very helpful.
- ultimoo 13y ago
  > - you wonder how you turned into "the build guy" when you actually signed on to make great products. Being "the build guy" is an important role in delivering great products. In fact, SaaS CI offerings in my experience cater to a small subset of real world apps, none of which are usually heavily used non-trivial apps. I helped build one SaaS CI product and really hope this changes in the coming years as we abstract more 'things'. But for the time being, 'build guys' or DevOps guys or whatever the latest word is play a vital role.
  - pbiggar 13y ago
    The build guy is definitely a vital role. However, a common direction in the industry is to do DevOps instead of having "build guys". For CircleCI, we like to think that the "build guy"'s role will move to writing cool project-specific tools on top of CircleCI, instead of the low-level work of actually maintaining the servers.

by pestaa 13y ago

pbiggar 13y ago

[disclaimer: I work at CircleCI, which is in the Bundle]. Good question! I think a lot of devs get therapeutic enjoyment from setting up CI. It starts out as fun for the first few hours, while everything is new and exciting. However, it turns to disdain very quickly when: - you need to remember how to set up postgres/rvm/lucene again - you need to add a 2nd server and realize you now need to manage a cluster (and you didn't automate the first one!) - you're away on vacation with your family, and someone calls you because the company CI server is down - you realize the tests run too slowly and now need to figure out how to make them faster - you get a bad performance review because of all the valuable engineer time you're wasting managing the CI server, which you could have outsourced for a fraction of the price - you wonder how you turned into "the build guy" when you actually signed on to make great products. These are the sort of problems that hosted CI like https://circleci.com https://circleci.com solve for you :)

olalonde 13y ago
For some reason I keep getting targeted by your ads. I guess I must have searched too much Jenkins related stuff recently. Unfortunately I don't think our tiny startup can justify a monthly expense for CI at the moment. Great ads by the way!
- pbiggar 13y ago
  Sounds like you should buy the hackerbundle and get 3 months free! ;)
  - jtheory 13y ago
    But that assumes that the tiny startup is either confident that, only 3 short months from now, they'll be able to spring for the full price of hosted CI, OR they can afford the time investment to set up their whole build process in hosted CI... and then spend the time to migrate away from it into a local setup before the 3 months is up. There's quite a bit more than the money involved when setting up SaaS infrastructure; even if the first 3 months were _sponsored_, the precious time invested would be wasted if they aren't signing up for the long haul. And if they are signing up for the long haul, then 3 months of X discount makes very little difference in the calculation.
    - pbiggar 13y ago
      CircleCI costs $19 a month for a small startup (I know it says $49 value, but really small startups will be fine on a smaller plan). That's a lot cheaper than buying a server, just in raw costs, not even taking account developer time to set this up (much cheaper than setting it up locally on Jenkins). If your tiny startup isn't able to afford a couple of hundred dollars a month for various hosted services after 3 months, then you're prioritizing wrong. You need to focus on building a valuable product and getting it to customers, not on building your own internal setup to save a little bit of money. Companies doing the former are much more likely to succeed than those doing the latter.
      - jtheory 13y ago
        It's not my startup under discussion, actually (I wasn't the first commenter above), but to be fair the first choice for a tiny startup might well be "stick with the shell scripts and dead-simple architecture for now" rather than any CI at all, hosted or not. Thanks for putting up the more relevant comparison price point, though, and I do agree with you that outsourcing non-core functions is essential to getting real work done on the actual product.
        pbiggar 13y ago
        Sure, I meant in the general case. I hope the $19 price point is low enough to encourage folks not to do it with shell scripts :)
philsnow 13y ago
> you're away on vacation with your family, and someone calls you because company the CI server is down This is a general problem with any kind of maintenance or setup that you might do. Did you write a diary of how you went about setting it up ? Did you communicate to the rest of your team how it's supposed to work / how you suspect it might break ? If not, don't be _too_ surprised to be The One Person who gets called about that thing.
- pbiggar 13y ago
  This is one of the reason we favour hosted services as much as possible. If the rest of the team has account on the service, you can likely solve your problems without relying on a single person.
drdaeman 13y ago
> you need to remember ${process} again That's why sysadmins should be encouraged to never configure systems directly, but use write-apply-observe-refine cycle of Puppet/Chef (or alike) declarative configurations. Sounds like a hassle (and sometimes it is, especially in cases where to-be-configured software has Turing-complete configuration files), but in my own experience actually proved very helpful.
ultimoo 13y ago
> - you wonder how you turned into "the build guy" when you actually signed on to make great products. Being "the build guy" is an important role in delivering great products. In fact, SaaS CI offerings in my experience cater to a small subset of real world apps, none of which are usually heavily used non-trivial apps. I helped build one SaaS CI product and really hope this changes in the coming years as we abstract more 'things'. But for the time being, 'build guys' or DevOps guys or whatever the latest word is play a vital role.
- pbiggar 13y ago
  The build guy is definitely a vital role. However, a common direction in the industry is to do DevOps instead of having "build guys". For CircleCI, we like to think that the "build guy"'s role will move to writing cool project-specific tools on top of CircleCI, instead of the low-level work of actually maintaining the servers.