Simplify

The past two weeks has been busy with Christmas and family time. My girlfriend and I went home to Denmark for Christmas and New Year and have been busy spending a lot of time with family and friends. However, in between all the food and social events I’ve still managed to move the product forward a bit. Yesterday a stupid accident meant going to the ER to get my finger glued together and it’s really inconvenient when trying to type on a keyboard! For the next week I’ll be coding with 9 fingers and I’m going to feel like a super human once I get the bandage off. I guess I should have started this post with “Dear Diary” 😉.

What did the Maker do? #

The thing that has been worrying me the most is the build server. It’s the backbone of the product and has to be really good. I’ve already gone through something like 2-3 iterations of it - the latest one was pretty much done by my friend Christian. I’m realizing that the beta is going to be starting very soon, so I can’t spend too much time configuring Docker clusters, optimizing Python code etc., so I keep trying to find ways to simplify. Recently, I discovered Google’s Cloud Build platform, which actually has an interface very similar to the build server that Christian had put together. The advantages is that it’s much more scaleable and a lot faster. I’ve spent a few days playing around with Google Cloud Build and it looks like it could be a really great solution to use for the beta. Why reinvent the wheel, before you need to?

The disadvantage with Google Cloud Build is the price. Since the beta is going to be paid, I think it’ll be alright. After all, I’m going to save a lot of development and DevOps time before the beta. After the beta, when more users are coming onboard, I can always consider moving to a custom build server. The really cool thing about the approach I’m doing now is that 99% of the code is native Docker stuff that I can easily move to another platform. None of the features I’m using are “Google Cloud Build” features. It’s pretty much all Docker that I could just run locally on my Mac if I wanted to.

I think this is proving to be a really good discovery, since it’s basically turning v1 of Branch into a basic “web app” project, since I won’t have to build my own build server for now.

Speaking of the app, I’ve made a lot of small improvements there as well. Next up is building the build overview, so you can follow your builds and see the logs etc. I’m pretty optimistic about this part now that I have removed a lot of time from the build server setup.

What did the Manager do? #

Not a lot. I didn’t have any calls with customers over the holidays, so most of my productive time was spend on development. The Google Cloud Build discovery did however remove a lot of stress from the Manager!

Happy New Year! 🎉