October 2024 Summaries

Our team's annual offsite in Oceanside, California, was a huge success, allowing us to align on strategy, strengthen bonds, and spark fresh ideas that will drive our next chapter. The retreat included a welcome reception, strategy discussion, hackathon, team culture session, fun day with a scavenger hunt, and non-work-related activities like game night and a team bonding day. We learned valuable lessons, such as the importance of discussions over presentations, taking creative time, giving space for open team culture discussions, booking a meeting space with lots of windows, and allowing full non-work related team bonding days. Our unconference sessions allowed us to focus on critical strategy, sparking innovative ideas and guiding our future direction. These in-person gatherings are incredibly valuable for fully remote teams like ours, fostering relationships, sharing experiences, and making memories that will energize us long after we return to our remote routines.

Dagger is powering the build system at Craft Cloud, a cloud-based, serverless hosting platform for Craft CMS projects. The platform uses Dagger's Go SDK to create container images programmatically, eliminating the need for manual Dockerfile manipulation. This has resulted in fast and flexible builds, with an average build time of 1 minute for Craft CMS sites. Additionally, Dagger is also powering Craft Cloud's backup system, handling both manual and automated nightly backups of production databases. Jason McCallister, Lead Cloud Platform Engineer at Craft Cloud, credits Dagger's open source nature, good documentation, and ease of use in making the decision to adopt it. He sees opportunities for further improvements, including smoke testing website deployments, matrix testing plugins, and caching. Jason recommends that platform engineers and DevOps professionals start by taking something they already have working and replacing it with Dagger, starting with their repository or GitHub action.

Dagger is an automation tool that helps teams deliver standardized Ansible environments consistently across different environments, reducing environment variance and improving productivity, reliability, and team collaboration. Safespring, a Nordic cloud infrastructure provider, implemented Dagger to solve the challenges of managing variable execution environments for their engineers. With Dagger, Safespring was able to create a predictable and consistent deployment process, eliminating last-minute surprises and improving overall efficiency. The team has seen significant benefits from using Dagger, including improved productivity, adaptability, and collaboration among engineers.