

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

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plorkyeran
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.

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pbiggar
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.

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enos_feedler
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.

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madh
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!

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

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

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lvh
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...](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/38476311/Screen%20Shot%202013-02-25%20at%2022.30.53.png)

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pbiggar
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.

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lvh
Hey, thanks for your reply; sorry for taking so long on mine.

I understand why the Travis features you mention are good for open source, I'm
not sure I understand why they're not good for web apps. Notifications (email
and IRC) sound great for in-house stuff too; and build statuses seem to make
sense on some central web page that gets a lot of hits from your dev team (be
it the Github front page, or whatever) as well.

The deployment part makes sense though, thanks!

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pbiggar
They aren't bad, its just a question of where you put your focus. So while IRC
could be used by businesses, its pretty rare (which surprised me, to be
honest, but there you go).

For notifications, my point was the way of implementation. For open source
projects, there tends to be a fairly low-traffic mailing list where all
notifications are sent. For businesses, there tend to be way more commits, and
developers care a lot less about what happens in branches they aren't working
on. So we personalized our emails so only the right people get the right
emails.

So its both a case of which features to prioritize, and the way the features
are implemented, that make the difference for commercial web development teams
:)

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splendidfailure
Congratulations guys! A genuinely deserved win - well done!

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paddyoloughlin
Congratulations. Excellent stuff.

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destraynor
Congrats!

