With the growing complexity of software, developers need better support so they can move quickly and deliver the changes that they’ve been working on to the end user. DevOps platform provider CircleCI is all about automating confidence, making sure that the developers are only limited by their own ideas and not by the ecosystem around them. In this episode of TFiR Let’s Talk, Mike Stahnke, Vice President of Platform, CircleCI, talks about the main challenges that software developers are facing today and how CircleCI is enabling developer teams to move faster and more efficiently with implementing CI/CD practices.

Key highlights of this video interview are:

• CircleCI ensures that developers can deliver changes they have been working on to the end user. Developers can be bombarded with open source libraries, third-party toolkits, and third-party API platforms. CircleCI aims to provide developers with a simpler approach to give them confidence that they have validated against all of these things. Stahnke introduces us to the company and tells us how they are helping developers.
• With the shift left movement, many developers are having more things moved into their pipelines, yet some of those developers do not have deep operational experience. CircleCI aims to provide a platform so that developers can be responsible and accountable for the code and the services they build. Stahnke explains how CircleCI is helping developers do more operations without full stack knowledge.
• Stahnke discusses the key challenges developers are facing, such as considering the instrumentation, measurements, and observability and being able to debug these things. He goes on to explain some of the complexities of these challenges.
• Technical debt is a common occurrence but Stahnke feels that sometimes it is not used in the correct instances. He goes into detail about how he defined technical debt and what some of the scenarios can look like.
• Tribal knowledge continues to be a challenge when developers move on to another position and their knowledge is lost. While there are lots of tools to help document things, developers are not always known for their documentation of information. Stahnke feels the best way is to create standards for how applications are built or set up together. He explains why he feels this is the best solution and how this works best.
• While some of these problems require technological solutions, others need cultural ones. Stahnke explains how CircleCI approaches cultural needs by providing data on what the team is doing and how it is behaving. He discusses CircleCI’s annual software paper on the state of software delivery and the different aspects of culture in organizations.
• CircleCI’s primary offering is CircleCI cloud which enables developers to push their code up to their repository of choice in the cloud and validate it there. Stahnke explains the key capabilities of their solution and how it is helping developers.
• CircleCI has recently announced support for GitLab SaaS. According to Stahnke, it was their number one issue that was upvoted by the community. He explains the key features and how it enables developers to use one CI system even with multiple inputs.

Connect with Mike Stahnke (LinkedIn)
Learn more about CircleCI (LinkedIn, Twitter)

The summary of the show is written by Emily Nicholls.