Podcast Name: Masters of Data

Episode Name: The Data of Releasing Software with Rob Zuber

In this episode of ​Masters of Data, ​host Ben Newton speaks with Rob Zuber, the CTO of CircleCI. CircleCI helps companies get innovation to the market faster and with better quality. The company is committed to taking the processes of continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) and making them accessible and easy for everyone. They aim to give their customers confidence in the software they’re delivering so they can focus on their core business values. To do this, CircleCI builds CI tools, taking care of the time-consuming work and freeing up the time of their customers. The engineers work in teams, each individually building software and merging it together as quickly as possible, multiple times per day, to determine that all of the software continues to function effectively.

Rob started his career in software in the late 1990s. He has worked in almost every kind of software field with various job descriptions, and has “seen the dark side of how software gets built.” In 2011, Rob started working on a company in the consumer space; this project was the first time he had used continuous deployment. He and his cofounder, Jim Rose, had a great experience building a product together, but didn’t find a product market fit. In 2013 and early 2014, Rob and Jim built many mobile apps, but this soon became challenging from a tooling perspective. At the beginning of 2014, they built an iOs and mobile CICD platform, which, though successful, made them realize that they also needed to build a backend to effectively create mobile apps. In mid-2014, Rob and Jim met folks from CircleCI who were building CI for everything except for mobile apps. They decided it would be a beneficial merger, so Rob and Jim’s company was acquired into CircleCI that year. At the time, CircleCI employed under 20 people, and today, the company has grown to over 300 employees. Since the merger less than six years old, Rob and Jim have risen in the ranks and are now CTO and CEO, respectively.

Rob is very passionate about his job. He loves solving the core problem of shipping software faster. In today’s world, he explains, it’s all about speed. You may have a great idea for an app or a game, but someone else has probably already had that idea somewhere else around the world, and it’s all about whoever can build and adapt it the most quickly. CircleCI helps get updates out, receive customer feedback, and implement changes with competitive speed. Rob has spent so many years in the field of technology, and has seen the blood, sweat, and tears that it took to get us to where we are today. Nowadays, he explains, you can learn basic JavaScript development and go build something really cool; that ability is only based on the hard work of past engineers. Rob presents Lyft as an example: Lyft simply connected people with phones to other people with phones. All of the technical work – the GPS systems, phone cameras, street mapping, turn-by-turn technology – had already been completed, and Lyft found the market and built upon it.

Data has grown exponentially in its importance to companies such as CircleCI. Rob loves using data to self-assess; he looks at how long it takes his builds to run and then uses that information to improve his processes. CircleCI also uses data to see trends across their teams and across their industry, and then partition based on which team members use particular language stacks, particular approaches, or even particular types of things they typically build. Data informs the company with details such as how much time it takes to get from the implementation of a code to when the code gets deployed, and helps them to see if they are enabling CI and CD to the best of their ability. Data helps compare an engineer’s estimations of when a product will be done to the reality. If estimations are consistently off, it could be a sign that the software is too complex. Seeing all of this information from an analytical perspective is, as Rob says, “really enriching for all of us in the industry.”

Of course, data itself is simply a collection of numbers, and it is what we do with it that really matters. Sometimes data can feel intrusive. If an employee feels like their manager is looking at their work and questioning their numbers, they may do different things to raise their number – in this case, by deploying multiple unimportant things. This, of course, skews the data and is very unproductive. Instead of making employees feel measured, data should be used to inform the team of the ways they can improve on the things they care about. Company culture is so important in this regard. If a manager can build a great culture, they can enable their teams with the data. However, if they try to throw tools at a bad culture, the employees distrust the tools and the people around them. Culture and data go hand in hand; if a company has a great culture where people will ask the hard questions but don’t have the data to help them make informed decisions, they probably won’t make the correct decisions. A company culture that drives open communication pairs with data perfectly. Rob believes the perfect scenario would be to put all the data on the table, come to an agreement about what the data means, and then discuss what they can do better going forward.

CircleCI recently produced a data report in which they looked at the actions of their customers and compiled insights based on those actions. In the report, they found out that the build time was faster than they expected, and that the customers who use their platform deliver software effectively all day, every day. Rob finds data fascinating, and is excited about its growing importance at CircleCI. The goal of their data collection and dissection is the same as the company’s overall goal: to continue helping software developers get their products into the hands of customers, deliver value, learn quickly, and do it all with confidence. As the world of software continues to evolve, Rob looks forward to finding better ways to deliver CircleCI’s services, and is thankful to be in a role that embraces that evolution.

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For more on Masters of Data, head over to:

http://mastersofdata.com

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Find out more about CircleCI at:

https://circleci.com/

Takeaways

• CircleCI takes the processes of CI (continuous integration) and CD (continuous deployment), and

  makes them accessible for everyone.

• The goal of CircleCI is to give their customers confidence in the software they’re delivering so

  they can focus on their core business values.

• CircleCI has grown from 20 to 300 people since 2014.

• The ability to easily develop software using basic JavaScript is based on a lot of hard work that

  happened in the past.

• CircleCI uses data to see trends across teams and learn how to better serve their customers.

• Productive use of data is based on a productive team culture. If a team feels pressured by the

  numbers, they will fudge the numbers and the data will become useless.

• Having an openness and trust in team culture helps a company to continually create better products and processes.

• A recent report discovered that CircleCI has very effective software delivery.

• The world of technology has evolved so much in the last 20 years, and will continue to change

  rapidly.

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