CircleCI - So we raised a bunch of money

http://blog.circleci.com/so-we-raised-a-bunch-of-money/

by pbiggar • 13 years ago

47 13 13 years ago

blog.circleci.com

pbiggar4• 13 years ago

Hey folks, founder here. Let me know if you've any questions!

lvh2• 13 years ago

Are you guys worried about what will happen when Travis becomes publicly available for private repositories? Do you think the familiarity with Travis of many developers will hurt you? (Or, to rephrase: have you considered doing a free service for open source repositories?

Also, why did you opt for building your own thing instead of running basically properly hosted Jenkis + plugins? (I know your FAQ mentions Jenkins, but it only explains why I'd want a hosted service, not not-Jenkins.)

Oh, and minor nitpick, after a particular entry your FAQ entries become mis-indented: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/38476311/Screen%20Shot%202013-02-25...

pbiggar4• 13 years ago

Well, this is going to be long :)

We're not worried at all. TravisCI has focussed on making a great product for open source, and we've focussed on making a great product for teams of full-time web developers. They have different needs, and both of us would need a lot more to be able to move into each others' space.

To give you a few examples, they allow you to test your code against different versions of Ruby at the same time, to show your build status on your public GitHub page, to be notified by IRC, and to send build emails to mailing lists. That stuff is great for open source.

By contrast, our features are all designed for your company's web application. We offer first-class support for Continuous Deployment. Our builds are lightning fast to reduce your feedback loop (a customer clocked us at 1m:30s vs 3m:50s). We also support automatic-parallelization to run your tests across multiple machines. We allow you to SSH into our machines to debug your tests. Our emails are personalized so you only get notifications you care about. We allow you to specify the exact patchset of Ruby (we support other langs, this is just an example) that you need.

There are probably some other differences, but basically, we've spent all our time making CI and CD amazing for teams of full-time web developers, and the caliber of our customers shows that: Stripe, Kickstarter, MongoHQ, and Intercom, to name a few who are well respected here. A product that has been honed for open source just doesn't provide the same productivity.

As for Jenkins, well its just not great. Its not a great experience, it allows you to do anything, but doesn't make it easy to do anything. The other part of this is that we wanted to focus on the platform, and Jenkins would have restricted what we could do. By limiting ourselves to a certain subset, we've been able to make the sort of product we described above - tuned to our customers needs. Would have been hard to do otherwise.

Thanks for pointing that out - I've pushed a fix.

destraynor• 13 years ago

Congrats!

plorkyeran• 13 years ago

I've been using CircleCI for a few weeks now and it's really quite impressive. I hope that with more money/developer time they'll be able to get the zero-setup stuff working for more languages and platforms. The manual setup isn't too bad, but the first-use experience of just checking a box on a list of my github repos and having it magically be able to build the project and run tests was absolutely amazing.

Oh, and the favicon should spin while tests are running.

pbiggar4• 13 years ago

Thanks! We are working on the bringing the zero setup stuff to more platforms - right now we do a great job with Rails, Node, Django and Play.

I'd like the favicon to spin. I seem to recall it causes a memory leak in chrome though - I wonder if that's been fixed.

madh• 13 years ago

I've been using CircleCI and have found it great. Plus the team is super-responsive and deeply committed to this product. Nice work guys!

enos_feedler• 13 years ago

Congratulations guys. Our team has been using CircleCI for a month or so now and the platform has done exactly what we need so far. Keep up the good work! Simple HipChat integration is a nice bonus since we use this as well.

plusbryan• 13 years ago

We use CircleCI for continuous integration at Sincerely and love it. I recommend their service every chance I get!

splendidfailure• 13 years ago

Congratulations guys! A genuinely deserved win - well done!

paddyoloughlin• 13 years ago

Congratulations. Excellent stuff.

CircleCI - So we raised a bunch of money

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