Guest: Keith Pitt (LinkedIn)
Company: Buildkite (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

With companies under pressure to keep on delivering new advancements and innovations, one of the key challenges we see is a pattern of creating complexity and then spending time and effort trying to abstract it away. One company who is working to change this loop is Buildkite, whose mission is to create simple CI/CD tools that improve developer productivity and happiness.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Keith Pitt, Co-Founder and CEO at Buildkite, talks about the evolution of CI/CD services and technologies over the past decade and some of the key challenges he is seeing. He introduces us to Buildkite and tells us how it is helping developers get their workloads to production as quickly as possible. Pitt goes on to discuss Buildkite’s acquisition of Packagecloud and how the companies are helping empower developers.

Key highlights from this video interview:

• Pitt gives us an overview of his background as a programmer. He talks about being left in a position where he was not allowed to use hosted CI/CD services anymore and not wanting to use any self-hosted tools like Jenkins. He talks about how this led to building his own hybrid model and what this entailed.
• Pitt tells us that nowadays there are open-source tools that do CI/CD pipelines but this was not the case when he built Buildkite. He talks about how open source is a great way to get started but that it makes sense when you have thousands of developers using it every day to have commercial offerings to fill in the gaps.
• A lot has changed in the continuous delivery scene and Pitt talks about the evolution of CI/CD services and technologies over the past 10 years. He discusses how nowadays we have built a lot of complex infrastructure that may not be well suited to some teams or for carrying out simple operations.
• Pitt believes the industry itself is complicated and there is a pattern of abstraction to try to simplify things. While he feels that the industry is under pressure to continuously advance, Pitt talks about the need to create simple systems that require simple machinery to try to get out of this loop.
• Buildkite helps developers get to production as quickly as possible, focusing largely on two key phases, the build and test processes. Pitt talks about the main pain points their customers are experiencing and how they are helping to solve these problems.
• Pitt explains the difference between deployable and non-deployable artifacts and the challenges of organizations managing these packages. He discusses the significance of the artifacts for security and compliance checks and how Buildkite is helping developers build their own lifecycles and workflows around these different package types.
• Buildkite acquired Packagecloud by a private equity company, and customers may have noticed over the past few years that not much has happened. Pitt tells us that they should now start seeing an acceleration of new features being added to the platform but he is passionate about maintaining the high reliability of the platform.
• Pitt discusses the importance of developer experience within companies and how tools influence the culture. He talks about the effects inadequate tooling can have on productivity and the happiness of developers. He feels many companies are still not prioritizing developer happiness and tells us why he believes this needs to change.
• Generative AI is being harnessed by thousands of developers, which lends itself to pattern matching. Pitt talks about some of the ways generative AI is being used for CI/CD pipelines.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.