January has come and gone, and it was one hell of a month! In addition to our Tokyo and Flutter announcements, we’ve seen the rolling out of our Japanese Twitter account, new SSDs for our Linux/Android stacks, and amazing new steps, such as the Android Build for UI Testing. Good times!
With this said, we would like to offer a heartfelt thank-you for everyone who contributed to Bitrise’s efforts in any way — whether it was by creating a new step, writing a guide, or helping us with testing our new features, we truly appreciate your help.
This year, we would like to continue our past tradition of creating monthly pieces to promote the very community that gave so much to us, and shine some light onto our most devoted supporters. As for January, our featured contributor is none other than Matthew Edwards, AKA ‘Bootstraponline’, who is one of our most active community members on both our public Slack and our discussion page, and is responsible for not only helping with us with steps, integrations, and frameworks, but hundreds of actual improvements we have made to our platform.
Bitrise Contributor Spotlight: Matthew Edwards, AKA ‘Bootstraponline’
Tell us a little bit about yourself, Matthew! What is it that you do?
I work on improving developer productivity by contributing to best in class frameworks, tools, and build technology. I'm leading mobile automation infrastructure at Instructure. I selected GitHub, Bitrise, Espresso, EarlGrey, Flank, and Firebase Test Lab for our CI pipeline.
What are your experiences with Bitrise? How did you first encounter it and how do you use it today?
Bitrise allowed us to migrate away from a legacy Jenkins setup. Jenkins, as anyone who's used it knows, is not designed for mobile. Bitrise replaces the need for a dedicated build engineer. The managed macOS and Linux images are amazing to use. Contributing new tools to the Docker base image is as easy as sending a pull request. I love the open source step workflow. Adding new steps to customize the features for Instructure is much nicer than writing Jenkins plugins.
How have you contributed to Bitrise so far, and what are you most proud of? Which one was the greatest challenge?
I have exceptionally high standards for our CI pipeline. I work closely with the Bitrise team to evolve the product roadmap to meet our needs. Some examples include:
- Rolling builds support so that we don't build intermediate commits
- Selective builds so that changing a readme doesn't rebuild all our apps
- API support for building custom dashboards for tracking build heath metrics
- Adding sqlite3, yarn, pip, and awscli to the bitrise base image.
- Improving the reporting experience for test results
What kind of projects are you building on Bitrise? What are you the proudest of?
I'm most proud of writing the cancel build and selective build steps, and then working with the Bitrise team to land them as official features in the product. I love the flexibility of immediately meeting my needs on the platform and then improving the product over time based on feedback. We use mono repos heavily, and these two features were critical in successfully adopting Bitrise.
I'm also working on Flank, a massively parallel Android and iOS test runner for Firebase Test Lab, which works really well on Bitrise.
Why did you choose to contribute to Bitrise? How did you find the experience of contributing?
I like the Bitrise team. They are super responsive to feedback. I see contributing to Bitrise as a way to advance the industry forward. Mobile build technology has a long way to go. I'm excited to be contributing to an open source platform that fully supports mobile apps. Contributing on GitHub is fun.
This marks the end of our monthly spotlight. We want to thank you again for all the hard work you’re putting into making Bitrise an even better service, and for taking the time to have this interview with us. We appreciate it, Matthew!
Contributors, assemble!
If Matthew’s story got you thinking about taking part in the contribution process, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Our contributor page has a list of options through which you can support us, and if you have any questions, comments, or you’d just like to meet some fellow contributors, you can always check in on our public Slack or our discussion page.
As our final thought for today, we would like to dedicate a round of applause to all of January’s top contributors:
🏆Bsky 🏆
🏆Deszip 🏆
🏆Maguhiro 🏆
Thank you all for your continued dedication towards Bitrise! We will always cherish all the love and support we are getting from you, and hope that we can do as much for you as you have for us.
