How Twitter and HubSpot Are Scaling Build Systems

Tech Talk at Night is a chance for engineers to get together and talk about the problems they're solving across the stack. We hosted the second installment of the event earlier this week, featuring talks from Twitter and our own development team about growing pains that come up with build tools as teams and systems scale. 

First, Jake Ouellette, senior software engineer at Twitter in Cambridge, walked us through why 'Builds Are People Too.' Drawing from his experience working on Twitter's mobile SDK platform, Fabric, he talked about the dangers of failing to maintain your builds and how engineering teams can and should avoid "build debt" the same way they would avoid technical debt.

Next, Jon Haber, staff software engineer on our Platform as a Service (PaaS) team, closed out the evening with a talk on how and why Jenkins is no longer a match for HubSpot. He introduced Blazar, a new (early-stage) open-source build system the PaaS team has been developing. It detects new projects automatically in Github, improves developer notifications, and proactively builds all branches of a project across the hundreds of repositories at HubSpot.

Watch both presentations and audience Q&A here:

Stay tuned for the next Tech Talk at Night and in the meantime, check out #TechTalkatNight for photos and highlights from the September event.