The path to build happiness

Jenn Strater walks you through the best practices she's learned since transitioning from a software engineer at various product companies to working for a company that focuses on build automation.

In a healthy DevOps culture, everyone is a part of the release process, but that’s not always the case for builds. Sometimes the developers own it. Sometimes the ops team owns it. In many organizations, no one owns it. Because of this, engineers (Jenn Strater included) have grown complacent with inefficient builds and even joke about how bad build times are. Now that she works as a developer advocate and teaches others about build tooling, she realizes that many of the habits she developed as a software engineer are incredibly inefficient. Join in to learn tool-agnostic steps to achieve build happiness, including measuring your builds, analyzing the data to see how developers and CI systems are running builds, improving build processes using build automation tooling, optimizing builds with incrementalization and/or parallelization, and iterating to maintain build happiness.