Mint

We're looking for a few more beta testers for Mint, the new build/CI tool that we're developing at RWX. As a thank you, we're offering $2,000 in free CI usage when Mint launches.

In beta, Mint will run alongside your existing CI so that you can directly compare and see the benefits in:
- faster feedback to engineers (reduced wall clock time)
- lower costs due to effective caching (reduced cpu time)
- improved DX surfacing actionable insights to engineers
- simplified build config, testing, and local invocation

The beta will be completely passive to your engineering team, so there won't be any disruption to your existing workflows or pipelines.

✋ If you're interested please reply to this email

We're also sharing the first public preview of Mint at the end of May. Join us for one of these sessions:

🗓️ Tue May 30 at 4pm Eastern
https://www.rwx.com/events/2023-05-30-mint-preview-1

🗓️ Wed May 31 at 10am Eastern
https://www.rwx.com/events/2023-05-31-mint-preview-1

 

ABQ

For ABQ to support retrying CI builds, it needs to maintain state of which workers ran which tests. We released ABQ 1.4.0 which adds support for loading test runs from other queue instances via remote storage.

If you’re using an RWX managed queue, we’ll update you automatically. If you’re self hosting, check out the release notes for more details.

ABQ is built to be highly efficient with CPU and memory utilization. Check out these monitors from a customer who recently launched ABQ with dozens of engineers running 16 parallel processes!

If you haven’t yet, we’d be grateful if you can star the repo on GitHub:

 

Captain

We released Captain 1.11 which adds test file partitioning directly to `captain run`. The partition index is automatically inferred on Buildkite, CircleCI, and GitLab, making it easy to split your test files into groups for parallel execution. With Captain Cloud, timing is automatically tracked and adjusted so that your partitions stay balanced. With Captain OSS, you can check a timing file into your repository.

If you haven’t yet, we’d be grateful if you can star the repo on GitHub:

 

From Our Blog

Our first design for ABQ didn’t quite work out. It turns out, flaky tests cause problems with queue-based clustered workloads on CI 😅

When we released ABQ and Captain as open source tools, we decided to rewrite the git history. To add verified signatures to the new commits, we wrote a multiplayer script that our whole team ran. Here's how we did it:

 

In Other News

This segment could be the elevator pitch for Captain:

@SpotifyUSA traces nearly every issue they have with their app back to a flaky test.

But when you run that test again - and this time it works, we ignore it and move on.

This is introducing errors and creating an infinite pit of software sorrow say @gradle CTO @JustinReock

 

Getting Started

We’re happy to help with any integrations of Captain or ABQ. We’d also love to chat about any build or test problems in general. We’re just getting started with the impact we can make on improving build and test processes for engineering teams. Say hello on Discord, follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn, or send us a reply to this email.

Dan, Tommy, and the RWX Team