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Comment by jipiboily | Hacker News Reader

JP, author of the post here - let me know if you have any additions / questions! :)

I would like to have seen a section for when continuous integration is NOT needed, and would be overkill. For example, I have a solo project where my workflow is: make changes to code, run the test suite, fix any failures that come up, and then push to heroku. I tried CircleCI but I found that the only benefit it offered me was offloading the testing and deployment to another environment. In some ways it actually complicated my workflow, not simplified it.

You're right; CI is pretty much a waste for a single person dev shop. But it's a godsend when working on larger projects: it centralizes processes that should ideally happen automatically, and increases developer confidence in the quality of the codebase by removing the deployment variables from the situation. Any team working on a reasonably large project should be using CI in some form.

For example, if you have a staging environment, and a developer pushes a change to that environment and wants you to make changes and test against his changes, you have to coordinate the deployment to make sure you don't overwrite his changes and vice versa. With CI, all check-ins would get automatically deployed to the staging environment using static scripts, so every deployment is exactly the same. It saves a lot of developer time, and removes the "which developer is a better sysadmin" variable from the equation.

maybe a link to the seminal article by Martin Fowler from 2006 could be useful for those who want to learn more? http://martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIntegration.html

Of course CI is older than 2006 but that article is the most referenced one, and for good reasons IMHO

No mention of CloudBees?

As mentioned in the post, there are TONS of options, I just mentioned a few ones :)

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