Celebrating 7 Years at CircleCI With Continuous.Academy

Today marks my 7 year anniversary at CircleCI. Those of you who are familiar with startups know what a rarity this is. Over my career many of my colleagues tend to last 2-4 years at a company before moving on. While I’m not planning on leaving just yet, there’s been something on my mind. A project I’ve been wanting to build for years to sum up my experience at CircleCI.

As my 7 year anniversary approached, I figured today would be a great day to kick off this project and serve as a forcing function. Let’s talk about Continuous.Academy.

I started CircleCI in 2016 as a Developer Advocate and guess what? I knew practically nothing about Continuous Integration. While that might sound like a poor hire on CircleCI’s part, my skill and experience as a Developer Advocate and my passion for all things tech won them over. Or at least, that’s what I tell myself. 😄

My first few months on the job I quickly dove into CI and CD. I memorized the marketing talking points we had, read tons of articles on the Internet, and most importantly, went around learning and even teaching at local meetings and conferences around the country. CI was smart but not enough companies were using it.

In 2023, CI has matured. There’s more established players like us (CircleCI), there’s “we do a little of everything” players like GitHub and GitLab, and most importantly, more software engineers are now familiar with what this is all about. I’m very happy to see the change. We helped make a difference.

There’s more to do though. The bits of information on CI and CD such as how to test a React application, why single purposes PRs are important, how to structure an app so that it’s easier to test, are all scattered around the Internet. Not to mention that getting into CI as a newbie is a lot harder when it comes to actually writing tests for your software. Many languages have slightly different ways of doing it, with different libraries, and philosophies. I’ve wanted a single website I can go to to learn more about these things. My community, docs, and open source background has led me to announce this project.

Kicking off Continuous.Academy

Continuous.Academy will be a website where people can learn about Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment. It will cover high level concepts, define terminology, list out CI providers, and dive into the testing aspects of various programming languages. The site will be free for everyone to read, no ads, open source, and built by the blazing fast Hugo static site generator.

Contributing

I’ve been in CI for awhile now but there’s too much knowledge for just one person to have. I’m going to need contributors to help me along with this as I go. Helping with knowledge, proofreading, structure, and more.

As of today the website is pretty much non-existent, just a landing page really. Once I get the initial structure of the site down and some stub pages, that’s when I’ll really need help to add additional content.

Keep track of the project

The starting point should be the website, https://Continuous.Academy. From there you can join the mailing list so I can let you know about important milestones, there’s links to the Mastodon and Twitter accounts, as well as the GitHub repository.

I’m not ready for PRs just yet but if you’re interested in this project and would like to volunteer, or if you have ideas/feedback on what you’d like to see, please let me know in the comments below or open an issue on the repo.

Hopefully I’ll see you around.