The year is almost over, so like everyone else, we've been spending time reflecting on the past 12 months. In our case, very very exciting months. Join us as we go over some of the highlights:
Bitrise in 2019
🚀 We raised a $20 million Series B. - We're using this influx of cash to help even more developers and organisations build and operate better mobile applications, to stay independent and to grow Bitrise into a single-screen mobile DevOps platform.
👥 3xing our headcount - In January we were around 30 employees and by this year's end, we're tripled that. 💪 We now have an HR department, legal, UI/UX researchers and a ton of other folks and departments that weren't around last year. We started hiring remotely and opened a bunch of new offices (Boston, San Francisco and London). We're hiring!
🤝 Acquired Outlyer - Bitrise acquired Outlyer, a company doing some truly awesome monitoring work from London, UK. Together, we're preparing for a groundbreaking new mobile monitoring extension to Bitrise that'll become available next year.
🎬 Our first CSS video - We're very proud to present how Bitrise improved and streamlined Eureka's CI/CD process and enabled them to build a flexible and customizable workflow for their app development:
🎬 Launched ASMR video tutorial series - As an April Fool's joke, we've prepared a bunch of serious Bitrise tutorials as not-so-serious ASMR videos. Check them out!
📱 Mobile DevOps - We started spreading the word on Mobile DevOps and were listed as one of the world’s coolest DevOps startups.
🚀 Many, many more builds - Imagine a long line of trucks continuously dropping off new Macs to our datacenters and you'll be pretty close to what that looked like.
Our first Bitreat
Over three days, we learned a lot about each other, the way we (want to) work together and who makes for the fastest dragon boat team: Turns out, it's not so much raw strength as it is endurance and coordination. There's probably a lesson about startup life in there somewhere.
Also, we were reminded that Apple doesn't really care about our downtime when a new Xcode beta was released while we were chilling next to Lake Balaton:
Events, conferences, and visits
In 2019 we strived to meet our users and our future users too. We spent a great deal of time visiting developers that use Bitrise, traveling around the globe with cross-functional teams, just to make sure we make decisions and develop features that actually help developers build awesome apps.
Attended 25+ conferences
Visited 15+ cities in over 12 countries on 4 continents
Learned from 250+ Customer Visits
Reached 12.500+ individuals
Community
We wouldn't be where we are without the support of our community – and we're always happy to celebrate this fact. This year, we went the extra mile to try and give back to the ones who gave us so much.
Weekly Community Roundup
We started a series of recurring blog posts that highlight and share all the love that we get through social channels, as well as all the interactions that happen between members of our community. All the articles, talks, presentations you shared, and all the heartwarming tweets you posted — without them, this year would not have been the same. Here's a huge shoutout to all the folks who were featured on our Roundups (and to the ones who will be featured in the future as well)!
Contributor Programs (Writers' and Speakers' Programs)
We launched the Writers' and Speakers' Program, aiming members of the community who love to share their knowledge of Bitrise with others — may that be in writing or in the form of public speaking. They have already seen great success, and we owe it to all our members — but the best is yet to come! In the future, we will be expanding these programs, and will be moving towards a full-fledged evangelist program, tailored to the needs of our most active enthusiasts.
Bitrise User Groups (BUGs) 🐛
Knowledge and experience sharing is key in becoming more proficient at CI/CD, so we wanted to create a space for our fans where they are encouraged to show their setups and best practices to others. In addition to the Japanese BUGs (three and counting), we also saw our first Polish BUG this year, and were delighted to see the reception they got. We're planning to have recurring BUGs, so if you're up for organizing a meetup for all your local Bitrise enthusiasts, just let us know, and we'll help you out!
New features highlight
📱 Out-of-the-box Flutter support on Bitrise! - Bitrise started to support Flutter apps in early January and now about 8% of our total apps are Flutter projects!
🛳 Bitrise Ship - Send your app to testers without leaving Bitrise or edit metadata and deploy straight to Google Play or the App Store with a single click.
📃 Bitrise Test Reports - This add-on collects all your test reports in one place. You can view and download all your test artifacts and export the results of your own custom testing scripts.
❎ We've crossed out a couple of things from the list titled Painpoints of Devs. Added
- SAML SSO,
- manual approve for PR builds
- App Store Connect 2FA -
- Rebuild with Remote Access to check the build on the VM itself
🤖 Automate iOS codesigning for real device UI testing with Codesigndoc - For iOS UI testing on a real device, you need to have codesigning arranged. We've updated Codesigndoc and it can now find the right files for the UITest targets for you.
💻 Add a new app to Bitrise from the terminal - You can easily register a new Bitrise app from the CLI too, not only from your browser.
🤖 Bitrise Xcode stacks come with Android tools installed - Xcode stacks with Android tools means more Xcode versions available for cross-platform developers.
✅ Bitrise Checks on GitHub - See an extended version of the classic status checks Bitrise sends back to GitHub, including Bitrise build summary and a check status.
