July 2022 Summaries

I'm Plushcap, your new Developer Advocate at Bitrise, here to share my journey and help ease growth in tech for others like myself. I've been working at Compass for 10 years, learning on the job and accumulating insights into what I didn't enjoy about certain roles. I eventually transitioned into mobile app development and realized a role as a Developer Advocate would allow me to work with customers, create content, speak at conferences, and code, aligning perfectly with my diverse skills and experience. My goal is to promote diversity in tech by hiring people who might not have direct experience but bring unique strengths and skills, helping others like myself find their way into the industry.

I'm excited to join an organization that is pushing the boundaries of what's possible, working on cutting-edge technology, and making a real impact. I was looking for a place where I could build things from scratch and have a significant impact, and Bitrise offered me that opportunity. As a Partner Manager, I lead the partnership team, supporting our technology partners to build integrations and working with solutions partners to help them implement Bitrise for their end clients. I've learned that there's no micromanaging at Bitrise, you're really free to become the best version of yourself through continuous learning. What keeps me inspired is seeing the product being used by actual people and knowing that I was working on it specifically. To work effectively at Bitrise, you need to be comfortable stepping out of your comfort zone, manage yourself and your time well, and learn by doing. The company values self-development and learning, so if you're passionate about it, we want to hear from you.

The term DevOps encompasses philosophies, practices, and tools that facilitate effective and efficient app delivery, particularly in the context of mobile development, where agile nature requires a different approach. Android DevOps poses unique challenges due to the OS's strengths also making development more complicated, but resolving these issues can help reach a wider audience as Android is expected to take a larger market share in forthcoming years. The most common roadblocks in Android DevOps include over-reliance on a single developer, building on different machines, device fragmentation, and convincing teams to make the change, which can be addressed through automation with CI/CD practices. PJ Welcome's roadmap for mobile success involves automating branch release strategies, code reviews, app architecture, code coverage, and static code analysis, tying these components together and creating pipelines based on specific branching strategies to improve development times and efficiency.

In a recent customer video, the mobile team at Vestiaire Collective discussed their experience switching from Jenkins to Bitrise and the benefits they've gained, including saving time to focus on improving their app for millions of users. Shifting to a mobile-first approach required taking mobile seriously, with the company now prioritizing iOS and Android applications over its web-based business model. Stable, transparent Continuous Integration (CI) is essential for improving developer experience, allowing the team to easily set up and change pipelines and iterate on development pipelines without affecting production. Using next-generation machines accelerated build times by 50%, while implementing analytics and monitoring tools helps optimize pipeline performance. Finally, secure and flexible tools are necessary to scale the app, with Bitrise providing the flexibility and scalability required to support a growing team and international expansion.

This was the writer's second time attending Droidcon Berlin, an Android developer conference. The event featured various talks on modern Android development, architecture, testing, security, and other topics. Google's Developer Relations team presented a session about best practices for Modern Android, covering Jetpack Compose, Material Design 3, and new architecture and testing recommendations. The writer also gave a talk on DevSecOps and how to include security testing in CI/CD pipelines. Additionally, the conference included sessions by Firebase and OWASP MASVS & MSTG teams, as well as community-building activities such as a comedy talk and a panel discussing the war in Ukraine. The event concluded with a movie night sponsored by Bitrise and announcements about future Droidcon conferences.

A new feature called Build Pipelines is being introduced by Bitrise to help developers manage complex build structures. This feature allows users to break their workflows into stages, build and test in parallel, shard tests, and get faster PR feedback. It provides a top-level configuration for the entire CI/CD process and can be used to set up advanced configurations with multiple tasks running parallel or sequentially. The pipeline's building blocks are steps and workflows, arranged in stages that run in parallel and sequentially. Users can differentiate between standalone builds and builds part of a pipeline, fix failed builds faster with partial rebuild, and share artifacts more easily. Build Pipelines also introduces new steps such as 'rerun tests without rebuilding' and 'Pull Pipeline intermediate files', making it easier to pair up with other steps like Xcode test without building for iOS or Android Instrumented Test. Additionally, users can try out a sample iOS app to set up a pipeline without changing anything in their mobile app's YAML file.

Flutter is an open-source framework by Google for building multi-platform applications from a single codebase, requiring macOS machines for developing, testing, and packaging iOS applications. To build, test, and package Flutter apps faster, this article uses the latest Xcode stack on an M1 machine. The process involves cloning a project, installing dependencies, preparing Android Emulator and iOS Simulator, and running various commands to build and install the app. Once ready, the application can be integrated with CI servers like Bitrise to start building a CI/CD pipeline. Bitrise provides out-of-the-box Flutter Steps for building, testing, and deploying apps, allowing easy integration with existing projects and teams. The process involves adding the project to Bitrise, scanning it, and configuring workflows to include required steps such as installing dependencies, running unit tests, integration tests, and exporting iOS and Android apps. By using M1 machines, build times are significantly reduced, saving time and credits for development teams.

Bitrise is a company that values its employees and provides opportunities for growth and development. The US Sales Manager, Michael Roguly, attributes his success to the meritocracy culture of Bitrise, which allows him to take ownership of his work and learn from mistakes. To be effective at Bitrise, one needs to be curious about the product, gritty and hard working, and care about colleagues. Michael's career journey is an example of how hard work and self-starting can lead to success in a company that values its employees. With open job openings available, interested individuals can learn from Michael's story and potentially join Bitrise.

Software testing is a crucial process that assesses the quality of software and reduces the risk of software failure in operation. It involves various activities, including test planning, analyzing, designing, implementing tests, reporting test progress and results, and evaluating the quality of a test object. Software testing can be categorized into different types, such as functional testing, non-functional testing, unit testing, integration testing, system testing, acceptance testing, user acceptance testing (UAT), alpha testing, beta testing, exploratory testing, regression testing, and more. The objectives of software testing include preventing defects, verifying requirements, checking the completeness and functionality of a test object, building confidence in its quality, finding defects and failures to reduce the risk of inadequate software quality, providing information to stakeholders, and complying with contractual, legal, or regulatory requirements or standards. Quality assurance (QA) is related to testing but not the same, as it includes all activities that direct and control an organization about quality, while testing is a specific process that supports the achievement of appropriate levels of quality. Software development and software testing are closely linked, with each development activity having a corresponding test activity, and test levels such as unit testing, integration testing, system testing, and acceptance testing being used to verify different aspects of software quality.

I joined the Bitrise booth at the TNW Conference in Amsterdam, Netherlands a few weeks ago where I met fellow tech enthusiasts, learned about Amsterdam's tech culture, and hung out with the Bitrise team. This was my first time attending the two-day conference and I was joined by various teams from Bitrise, including product marketing, field marketing, and people teams. Working with this team is great because they come from all over the world to collaborate. I attended talks on scaling businesses, a cashless society, the metaverse, web3, fintech, and more, including discussions centered around diversity and inclusion. I was happy to see many talks focused on these topics, featuring speakers like Tracy Benson, Marian Spier, Mursal Hedayat, Gillian Tans, and Terence Guiamo. The conference also had interesting fintech discussions, with talks from Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan and Claire Jones. Attending TNW gave me an opportunity to learn about the tech scene in Amsterdam and meet industry leaders, UX/UI designers, salespeople, and content marketers like myself. I met people from various companies, including MessageBird, ABN, Mapiq, Stream.io, and others. Being able to network with fellow techies was a nice experience, but it's also important to remember networking lessons, such as giving space when needed, preparing an elevator pitch, writing down notes about meetings, and not being too nervous. If you're interested in joining Bitrise or attending events like TNW, check out their career page and job openings.