A few weeks ago we wrapped up UnblockConf ‘21 — our first ever conference for teams implementing CI/CD at scale! 🥳 If you weren’t lucky enough to join, or you just want to relive the fun, here’s a look at what happened ✨
Day 1
The first day kicked off with Rose and I welcoming everyone, followed by a keynote on the Future of CI/CD with Tim & Eleanor (and our signature speaker reveal 🙆♀️), a talk by Philipp from the Bazel team, and finally a talk by Keith from Lyft.
- 📺 The Future of CI/CD by Tim Lucas and Eleanor Kiefel Haggerty from Buildkite
- 📺 How Bazel built its CI system on top of Buildkite by Philipp Wollermann from Bazel
- 📺 Mobile CI at scale by Keith Smiley from Lyft
A peek backstage with our fun loving hosts.
Keith Smiley from Lyft talking through Lyft’s mobile CI architecture built on top of Buildkite
Day 2
After everyone got a good night’s rest and refilled their coffees, we kicked off day two with another keynote, this time by Jasmine and Jasmine from the Buildkite Test Analytics team. Followed by a talk by Shay from Wix, Oliver from Pinterest and Lelia & Gary White Jr. from Wayfair.
- 📺 Flaky tests, FML by Jasmine Quek and Jasmin Wong from Buildkite
- 📺 6 Challenges Wix faced while building a super CI pipeline by Shay Sofer from Wix
- 📺 Moving Pinterest’s iOS builds to autoscaled EC2 Mac by Oliver Koo from Pinterest
- 📺 Resilient, Dynamic and Fun CI with Buildkite by Lelia Bray-Musso & Gary White Jr from Wayfair
Shay Sofer from Wix talking why and how they switched to Buildkite
After all the talks were done we headed over to Skittish to meet each other and say hi using spatial audio and our animal of choice 🐥🦆🐷. Fred from Buildkite kicked off a retro computing quiz, livestreaming beautifully retro terminal graphics while we frantically ran between cushions to cast our vote. And Juanito found a race condition 😅
Some retro computing trivia fun at the afterparty in Skittish
Day 3
The final day was a non-stop lineup of technical webinar presentations hosted by Nick and Mike from Buildkite, and featuring partners such as AWS, Honeycomb, DataDog, Cloudsmith and Flare.
- 📺 The Continuous Software Pipeline: CI/CD Meets Continuous Packaging with Ciara from Cloudsmith
- 📺 PagerDuty Change Events with Mandi from PagerDuty
- 📺 Using Datadog’s new CI Visibility tools with your Buildkite CI/CD pipelines with Brian from Datadog
- 📺 Build observability with Honeycomb with Pierre from Honeycomb
- 📺 AWS Graviton with the Elastic CI Stack for AWS with Arthur from AWS
- 📺 Getting started with Elastic CI Stack for EC2 Mac with Manish from AWS
- 📺 Test Analytics Deep Dive with Grant from Buildkite
- 📺 Buildkite 101 with Mike from Buildkite
- 📺 Autoscaling Bazel RBE and EC2 Mac with Buildkite, Flare and Nodeless Kubernetes with Tatiana from Flare.Build + Madhuri from ELOTL
Yeah… that was a LOT for a single day, single track!
Thank You! 👏
A huge thank you to all our speakers; Philipp Wollermann, Keith Smiley, Shay Sofer, Oliver Koo, Lelia Bray-Musso, Gary White Jr, Eleanor Kiefel Haggerty, Tim Lucas, Jasmine Quek and Jasmin Wong. They so genorously shared their triumphs and struggles with sprinklings of humour and home delivered practical takeaways, so much goodness! 🙌
Thanks also to our technical webinar partners: Cloudsmith, PagerDuty, Datadog, Honeycomb, AWS and Flare. They took us on a deep dive into tooling, architecture and integrations to get the most out of our CI/CD pipelines. ⚡️
And what’s a developer conference without the people? A massive thanks to our attendees. We had so much live chat, Q&A and helpful vibes — you were as welcoming, open and warm as a developer community can get! 🥰
With over 1200+ registered attendees from over 25 countries, seeing our global community coming together and engaging with such friendly vibes was the highlight for me. 🌎🌍🌏
Being a part of bringing together our user community for the first time was an incredible experience, I'm not going to lie when I say this came together in record time and our team felt the reality of what that meant. But also, the outcome blew all our expectations out of the water. 🥳
I'm not crying, you're crying
If you missed out on all the fun and festivities this year, don’t dismay! You can watch the talks on the Buildkite YouTube channel (be sure to subscribe). And an even bigger and better UnblockConf ‘22 is closer than you think ⚡️
p.s. spotted the 🐶 video tees at the event? They're now available to purchase. As for the kites? You’ll have to wait until the next special opportunity for a chance at one of those 🪁
p.p.s. we're hiring a developer advocate in the North American timezone, come and work with me! 😊
