It’s All About the Small Stuff

Every so often, the CodeShip team likes to take some time and let our engineers work on anything that’s bugging them, or just something small they’ve been wanting to patch up for a while. Sometimes we do this in-person during our regular offsites, and sometimes we do it in between feature development work from the comfort of our own homes.

Since CodeShip is a product for engineers, nobody can sweat the details on it better than our engineers themselves. In fact, most of the stuff you love about CodeShip was probably our engineers’ ideas -- and anything you don’t like, they’re probably pretty eager to fix too since they use CodeShip all day to deliver CodeShip itself.

With that said, we’ve just finished up a short period of this type of self-directed house cleaning and we wanted to take some time to share with you what our engineers opted to work on last week. It’s may not all be visible, but it all adds up to a better CodeShip.

Slack formatting

Josh Puetz also did a nice and long-overdue formatting tweak on our Slack integration. In addition to making the commit message more readable, the SHA itself is now a direct link to that commit on GitHub.

GitHub and GitLab

Another one of our senior Rails engineers, Kyle Rames, took some time to improve our handling of self-hosted SCMs.

We now have much better error-handling for GitLab CE/EE and GitHub Enterprise. Whereas before errors related to user authentication scoping were generic, we now explicitly check the scope and let you know if we have encountered a permissions-related problem.

We’ve also more strictly enforced our handling of minimum versions, which will cut down on errors seen in a few corner cases that could be difficult to debug.

Exclude branches

One of our newest team members, Adam Magan, took some time to finish up an often-requested feature that we’ve never quite managed to polish up until now: excluding branches!

We’ll be covering this in a separate post soon, but if you’d like you can now choose what branches your projects run on.

Performance

Finally, one of our front-end engineers, Valerie Rutsch, contributed to our long-running front-end overhaul. We’ve been rebuilding things in Vue and improving how our front-end and back-end communicate, and she’s applied that to our Teams pages.

In addition to a more usable columns-based design, you’ll also notice the pages are much snappier due to the new Vue implementation.

Conclusion

Sometimes blogs have exciting major features to announce, but we’re pretty excited about this one because of the minor work. We don’t always take the time to talk about it, but the kind of work highlighted here is constantly happening at CodeShip and the product is always getting better in both big and small ways. A lot of that work - like the items mentioned here - are self-directed, which is a part of our culture we’re proud of -- both the freedom for our engineers to invest in work like this, and the quality of engineers we have that love making the small things better.

Additional resources

• Read more about using Vue.js to build a notes manager

• Watch the webinar about building a Kubernetes app with Amazon EKS

• See who the top DevOps experts are in the industry