GitKraken is a Git GUI client for Mac, Windows and Linux. Because it’s cross-platform, it’s essential that we practice continuous integration (CI) before we release. CI helps us catch issues earlier so we don’t have to wait to find out if our code is going to work.
We recently had to look for a new CI system after our old OS X system stopped building. The search began and ended rather quickly; These were our requirements:
- Work simply
- Work quickly
- Be responsive
- Be online
- Have great uptime
- OS X compatible
In our search, CircleCI seemed the most promising. It met all of our requirements and seemed easy enough to ramp up; so we gave it a go and it has been working quite well.
Top 3 reasons why we use CircleCI:
1. It helps us go fast
At GitKraken, we have a pretty ambitious release schedule, so we need to work quickly and efficiently. We can’t work fast if we’re waiting for our build server to well, build. Compared to our Linux and Windows systems, CircleCI works the fastest and reduces our iteration time.
The time it takes for the spin up to build, and run the build, is fast and more importantly, it keeps functioning like that. We hadn’t seen that level of speed in any of our previous CI servers.
2. It knows things
In other words, CircleCI is intuitive. For our dev team, the interface itself is very easy to use, setup and navigate. Everything is where you would expect it to be, and finding the stuff you need is a cinch, which reduces development time and makes our devs’ lives a little easier.
3. It’s dependable
Software can be a fickle friend. At the time we started using CircleCI, we were completely stalled for a few days because as I mentioned before, our old build server just stopped working. Our experience so far with CircleCI is that it works the second you ask it to start working and then it keeps working. Its snappy and reliable which makes our team want to bang our heads against hard surfaces a little less.
Summary
Frankly, we really like what they’re doing over at CircleCI, and we’re looking forward to them doing more. CircleCI consistently builds fast, it’s intuitive to use, and it just works.
Ideally, we’d like to move more of our build process over to CircleCI because it has the ability to build on both Linux and OS X. Unfortunately, CircleCI doesn’t currently allow for multiple operating systems on the same account.