Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the practice of recording the desired state of your infrastructure using a declarative language. In this article, I’m going to assume that your team is starting from scratch. Maybe some of your build process has been scripted, and maybe there is some manual testing and quality assurance work happening. Many readers will find that they are midway through the IaC adoption journey I’ll describe, or that they have missed some steps.
In my interactions at industry events like AWS re:invent and KubeCon, I talk with a lot of developers. Devs often tell stories of things that prevent them from working quickly and efficiently. Many involve frustrating interactions with sys admins, SREs, or DevOps colleagues. One story I have heard several times involves a conversation like this: dev: Hey, SRE team. My build is failing and I don’t know what’s happening with the app in the build node.
Modern software development increasingly relies on distributed, service-based architectural patterns to achieve scalability, reliability, and rapid build, test, and release cycles. Two of the most popular service-based approaches are service-oriented architecture (SOA) and microservices. In this article, we will examine both approaches to identify their similarities and differences as well as some use cases for each.
Kotlin is one of the most versatile programming languages available, in large part because of the Kotlin team’s focus on bringing it to as many platforms as possible. It is the primary language for developing Android applications and is popular for JVM backends. Kotlin also features targets for native binary compilation with Kotlin/Native, and for web through Kotlin/JS. One of its most promising features is the ability to target multiple platforms it compiles to.
Testing is one of those activities that if not exhaustive will not have its complete impact on your software development process. Oftentimes developers are only concerned about testing the application layer of the system (a.k.a the codebase) and ignore testing the data layer (the database) which is also as important as testing the code itself.
Today is CircleCI’s 10-year anniversary. I sent the whole staff an email that captures the sentiment of this important moment and I wanted to share it with you here. It offers a glimpse into what we’ve accomplished as an organization in the last decade and how much more we’ll accomplish in the decades to come.
Today we’re sharing findings from The Total Economic Impact™ Of CircleCI, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of CircleCI. The study revealed that CircleCI delivered a 664% return on investment (ROI) over a three-year period and highlighted that our platform increased developer productivity by 10%. This results in a greater efficiency value of more than $4.3 million, enabling organizations to increase engineering velocity that drives business success.
If you maintain a Ruby gem, you are definitely familiar with the recurring manual tasks surrounding the release of a new version. After doing this for a while, you inevitably start thinking that some of these steps could be automated. They can! With a few lines of code, you can bring the amazing world of continuous delivery to your project and increase the reliability of the whole process while freeing up some of your time. Double win!
Programming is as much an art as it is a science. Personal preference plays a large role in determining your programming style, so you may not be surprised to find yourself in a debates with a peer. One ongoing debate is the choice between two different programming paradigms called functional programming and object-oriented programming. Which one is better? Which should you use?
