Building mobile infrastructure with Russell Stephens

We talked to Russell Stephens from Compass about building mobile infrastructure, the evolution from self-hosted Jenkins to the cloud, and streamlining CI processes.

In the latest episode of our podcast, we talked to Russell Stephens from Compass about building mobile infrastructure, the evolution from self-hosted Jenkins to the cloud, and streamlining CI processes.

In this episode

Russell is the Mobile Infrastructure Lead at Compass, a company that builds software for real estate agents. They have two tracks for mobile developers: feature-based roles for helping the product teams iterate on specific feature sets and a dedicated team for mobile infrastructure, where developers are responsible for maintaining and iterating on the mobile platform.

In this episode, we talked to Russell about his team’s CI journey, from the struggles of hosting an on-premise Jenkins solution to building a cutting-edge case of mobile infrastructure on Bitrise. We explored how their responsibilities have shifted from the team to the platform: whether it’s a beta build or delivering to the App Store, the team now has the entire process of building, testing, code signing, and shipping automated. We also discussed how the switch has impacted their day-to-day job, their team structure, and how it resulted in an increase in agility and productivity.

Listen to the episode here:

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About this podcast

In Mobile DevOps is a thing! we showcase developers and their processes and learn about the ways in which mobile development processes differ and overlap, through the lens of Mobile DevOps. The aim? Learning how to be more productive and build better apps, whatever technology you might be using. For this, however, we need your help as well — if you have any questions or topics in mind that you would love to hear about in our upcoming podcasts, let us know on Twitter, or through email.

You can find out more about Russell and his projects here, or check out their Engineering and AI blog. If you're interested in joining Compass, head to their careers page and explore their open positions.