March 2018 Summaries

The guest post by Armando Canals, co-founder at packagecloud, provides a comprehensive guide on setting up a continuous deployment pipeline for NodeJS projects using CircleCI 2.0. It details the configuration process of CircleCI to automate testing and deployment of npm packages to both public and private registries. The post explains the significance of npm as a package manager for Node.js, emphasizing its role in distributing JavaScript code, and outlines steps such as creating a .circleci/config.yml file, setting environment variables, and defining jobs for testing and deploying. The guide also highlights the use of workspaces to share data between jobs and ensures deployments occur only when a tagged commit is pushed. By leveraging CircleCI, developers can automate their software distribution pipeline, reducing errors and improving efficiency.

CircleCI employs a series of practices to ensure safe continuous delivery of services deployed on Kubernetes, with each service independently contained in its own Git repository. By leveraging Kubernetes' ability to roll out new code pod by pod, CircleCI can maintain multiple versions of code in production while minimizing risk. Strategies include deploying small changes frequently, using readiness probes to detect configuration errors before traffic is routed to new pods, and employing tools like CircleCI, Rollbar, and Slack for deployment visibility and tracking. Additionally, CircleCI uses RabbitMQ for asynchronous communication, ensuring message delivery by delaying acknowledgment until actions are completed, and incorporating unique identifiers to avoid duplicate processing. These practices aim to enhance the reliability and safety of the continuous delivery process.

CircleCI, since its inception in 2011, has grown significantly in terms of customer base and team size, now boasting over 540 employees across eight countries who support millions of developers running numerous pipelines daily. Following a Series F funding round, CircleCI intensified its hiring efforts, emphasizing roles that deliver both people and business value. The company redesigned its interview process to be more structured and behavior-based, aiming to identify the best candidates while providing a respectful and informative experience. The new four-step technical interview process, which includes hiring manager screens, paired programming sessions, team screens, and final wrap-ups, is intended to reflect the actual job environment and stress the importance of respectful interactions, real skill assessments, and inclusive language. CircleCI's approach focuses on continuous learning and refinement to improve the hiring process while maintaining high standards for candidate experience and competence, with feedback from interviewees generally being positive.