I’m on a lot of other optimization these days…but only because fast builds let me iterate quickly and CIs give me confidence in the changes. Fast builds and green checks are so very important if you want your team to do anything else quickly. Every team should make these a baseline priority. - ThreadSky

nickcraver.com • 89 days ago

I’m on a lot of other optimization these days…but only because fast builds let me iterate quickly and CIs give me confidence in the changes.

Fast builds and green checks are so very important if you want your team to do anything else quickly. Every team should make these a baseline priority.

Reposted from Kirill Osenkov

When @nickcraver.com joined Microsoft I was curious what he will naturally gravitate towards after he looks around. Nick looked around and decided to fix builds!

When @nguerrera.dev joined Microsoft, I already knew what he will deem to be most impactful task for starters: fixing builds!

Comments

nickcraver.com•89 days ago

I know I owe people updates of what I’ve been working on, but I’m not sure it’s very interesting. It’s fairly random day to day - mostly making things faster, unblocking teammates, keeping the gears turning in various places, fixing problems before they’re problems and debugging some tricky ones.

tashasev.bsky.social•89 days ago

So like is this a service you offer for any team or 😁

nickcraver.com•89 days ago

What’s weird is the reason most other internal teams find me (not sure how) is for Redis help…which isn’t my job at all, but my boss is cool with it, so help they receive. But hey, I’m game to chat on any system and see if there’s anything reasonable we can make better :)

nickcraver.com•89 days ago

I just like fixing things, it’s my happy place. And people here seem to be cool with me fixing things, so that’s awesome.

tashasev.bsky.social•89 days ago

It makes me so happy to see you happy, for real

clintrutkas.bsky.social•89 days ago

Nick, I have lots of your favorite tools that could have their pipelines be faster :)

tashasev.bsky.social•89 days ago

Bruh are you cutting in line

clintrutkas.bsky.social•89 days ago

I will bring back pancake day for faster pipelines

nickcraver.com•89 days ago

My last job was running a website on a few racks of servers and that was fun and had a set of challenges. My current team deploys to millions of servers and the logistics and problems are very different…so I’ll just be over here learning forever, which was my primary goal taking on a new adventure.

tashasev.bsky.social•89 days ago

“running a website on a few racks of servers” 🥲

nickcraver.com•89 days ago

I work with people who take a lot of care in what they do, strive to learn, and always help each other out. My team and boss are awesome - teaching me tons every week. I’m not sure what else you could ask for from a job - quite happy with where I ended up so far. I’ve been extremely lucky.

nickcraver.com•89 days ago

I’ve had several people asked me if I missed Stack. Yes, of course I do. Something many of us didn’t realize until moving on is the average level of folks we were working with was abnormally high. I keep up with some folks every week, and am ecstatic to see any friends as often as life allows.

nickcraver.com•89 days ago

Big companies are different, there are people here insanely smarter than I’ll ever be and people far earlier in their journey as well. It’s a wider range of levels all at once and there are people just insanely knowledgeable about their areas you can learn so much from. And I am doing just that.

nickcraver.com•89 days ago

The thing that brought me to this team is the tenure of my peers. I know there and many takes on this, but I find that people who stick around for many (some 10+) years tend to much better understand and learn from the consequences of their past decisions, and value fundamentals a bit more.

kirillosenkov.com•89 days ago

I've indeed been curious what you've been up to!

amias.net•89 days ago

I feel engineers get this but managers struggle with the link between spending time and money on good build architecture. Outside regulated environments and large vendors it can be hard to get traction.

nickcraver.com•89 days ago

It definitely depends on the manager, and having one that recognizes the value is (IMO) critical to the whole thing working. Luckily my manager is a damn good engineer, who happens to mange folks.

ladeak.net•89 days ago

Fast on CI or locally? How fast are you talking about?

nickcraver.com•89 days ago

Both! It’s going to be relative to the size of the project, for our main solution is 5-6 minutes for a full build, package, and unit test suite run locally. CIs builds are < 10m (more checks run), but E2E deploy and tests are much longer (~2hr)…still working on that now.

ladeak.net•89 days ago

That is really nice.

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