Zero to Startup

I'm documenting the process of taking Box CI from an idea to a business --

[Zero to Startup @zero_startup]

A thought to follow up the recent blog post: https://t.co/RAXO4UHwaD

Sometimes stuff takes longer to build than you thought not just because it's more difficult, but also actually much more *interesting* than you thought

You discover new, better ideas & features as you go!

[Zero to Startup @zero_startup]

Learning some stuff, building agent mode, about the relationship between configurability and design in a tool

Sometimes removing options makes the tool less powerful.

But other times, you *can* remove options precisely because the tool is *more* powerful.

[Zero to Startup @zero_startup]

The office 🙂

[Zero to Startup @zero_startup]

When you're building a CI product with itself, features like not having to couple your build to the way your CI works really matter 😀

[Zero to Startup @zero_startup]

Shipping some breaking changes to the backend.

Uh oh- how do I ship Box CI using Box CI when Box CI itself contains breaking changes..? 🤔

Oh wait -- boxci is just a wrapper around my build script. I can just run the script, without boxci. Super easy!

[Zero to Startup @zero_startup]

Agent mode is working locally!

So cool to watch builds run in my terminal by clicking a button on the website, or pushing to the repo!

[Zero to Startup @zero_startup]

It makes you realise how powerful CSS actually is, even just for layouts of mostly text.

[Zero to Startup @zero_startup]

Layout of CLI --help documentation is deceptively difficult

Seems like it's so simple: just text, it'll be easy!

But laying things out into sections without a layout manager, or even boxes of content that reflow responsively, and not many style options, is actually quite hard

[Zero to Startup @zero_startup]

Kubernetes and cloud platforms are truly amazing, as a hacker/bootstrapper they give you what would have been world class ops capabilities 10 years ago for like $30 a month for a basic setup. It is ridiculous.

[Zero to Startup @zero_startup]

The HN front page traffic spike last week caused perf issues even though blog was cached w/ nginx

Span up 4x nginx servers to fix 😅💻

Later realised I should look into using a CDN instead

Turns out all I had to do was *literally* check a checkbox on GCP to make it work 😂🤦‍♂️

[Zero to Startup @zero_startup]

On the one hand, amazing. On the other, doh!

I guess that's how you learn about these features though 👍

[Zero to Startup @zero_startup]

@andrew_n_carr Thanks!

Actually the Slack support channel is something I'd been thinking about, I think that'd be a great idea esp at the beta stage

[Zero to Startup @zero_startup]

This is the first week I'm starting where Box CI has some signed up users! Big motivation to get agent mode shipped this week 😀 Weekly goals set, now down to work!

[Zero to Startup @zero_startup]

@disposedtrolley I like this!

[Zero to Startup @zero_startup]

I'm thinking about taking the CI out of the name

I'm not sure CI is what this really is, or the usecase it's intended for. CI implies rigid process, pipelines. It's for the enterprise. It's for big teams.

This is for small teams of hackers shipping stuff and sharing the logs.

[Zero to Startup @zero_startup]

@disposedtrolley Yeah was also thinking this

[Zero to Startup @zero_startup]

@chemhack What I'm trying to build is more lightweight. I have a build script that already works, and that might change often. If I change it in dev, I don't want to have to port those changes over to a CI pipline config to get it to work for prod. I just want to run it, and share the logs

[Zero to Startup @zero_startup]

Box CI is CI for hackers

Complete control, speed, logs in real time in your terminal, on failure you have all the state to figure out why - all the good stuff about just running build scripts on your laptop.

With build history & log sharing on top!

[Zero to Startup @zero_startup]

@chemhack it implies your process is quite rigid, which is a great thing for big teams with people coming in and out, audit trails, security, all that kind of thing. That's 'CI' - it's something really for the enterprise or at least for pretty large teams