Bitrise Contributor Hall of Fame (November 2018) 🏆

November was another month full of community contributions. Join us in thanking all who created a new integration, wrote a guide or localized documentation on Bitrise. 🙌

November was another month full of community contributions. Join us in thanking all who created a new integration, wrote a guide or localized documentation on Bitrise.

Bitrise is by and for mobile developers. Literally. We got our start as an app development agency addressing our own frustrations with existing mobile CI/CD solutions, but beyond that, the developer community at large has contributed a great deal to Bitrise.

Every month, we'll tell you about the many people who contributed integrations or steps, how-tos or guides and localizations to Bitrise, plus we'll spotlight a single contributor through a mini interview. This month, that contributor is Karol Wrótniak of The Droids on Roids:

Bitrise Contributor Spotlight: Karol Wrótniak

Karol has been an Android developer for over 7 years at The Droids on Roids – Mobile & Web App Development Company from Poland. He actively participates in projects, especially those related to Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. He is one of the most active external Bitrise contributors. As GDG Wrocław co-organizer he carries out study jams and workshops. In his free time, he writes blog posts for the Droid on Roids blog and contributes to open-source projects.

How did you first come into contact with Bitrise and how do you use it now? What are your favorite integrations?

At the beginning of 2017, in Droids On Roids, we were looking for an alternative CI to our self-hosted Jenkins. Maintaining it consumed a lot of time, support for Android projects was very poor, the time for resolving issues was very long e.g. my last PR to Jenkins plugin was merged after 1.5 years (a long time after we switched to Bitrise).
We considered a few CI PaaS-es, Bitrise among the others. I decided to fill an issue or open a PR and check how long it would take the Bitrise team to resolve it. IIRC it is this PR. Viktor [Benei] from Bitrise answered within a few hours (including night time) and the PR was approved and merged the next day. As you can see one day on Bitrise vs 1.5 years on Jenkins - incredible difference. And here is my first reported issue.

How have you contributed so far to Bitrise and what are you most proud of? Which one was the greatest challenge?

I've opened dozens of PRs in Bitrise repos on GitHub and also I'm a maintainer of a few steps.
I think that the Flutter step is my favorite one. It was also the greatest challenge. It has to perform several actions: unpack Flutter SDK, setup environment and execute Flutter commands. There are also differences between stacks (macOS/Linux).

What kind of projects are you building on Bitrise? What are you the proudest of?

Primarily native Android apps. Then Gradle plugins and Bitrise steps. Bitrise also acts as a simple cron for maintaining STF by running this project.

I think that Giphy CAM is the biggest and most famous of my projects. Some basic info can be found here.

Why did you choose to contribute to Bitrise? How did you find the experience of contributing?

I like discovering bugs (fixing them if I can) and adding useful features to products I use. A significant part of Bitrise is open source so I can contribute.

Our Contributor page

Over the coming months, we're going to spend some time and effort better supporting the community that continues to support us. We'll do this by making it easier for events to ask for support (coming soon), creating a hub for people that frequently write and/or talk about Bitrise (coming soon) and by making it easier for contributors to connect to us and each other, while at the same time standardizing some fun rewards for contributions. This last effort kicks off today:

If you visit go.bitrise.io/community/contributing, you'll find a page explaining the ways in which you can contribute to Bitrise and the ways in which we'll support you when you do so. Long story short: We've created a private Slack community for Bitrise contributors that puts you in direct contact with our own engineers, tech writers and each other, plus we'll reward contributions with awesome perks like the limited edition Bitrise contributor t-shirt, invitations to Bitrise sponsored developer events, extra build minutes, discounts and more.