Build Master

Posted by indomitablehef | Filed under Continuous Integration

I remember, with alarming clarity, when someone first explained Continuous Integration to me. I was in a rented car, between Atlanta and Nashville, with Stephen Franklin and Craig Israel. Craig was telling us how his company used NAnt and CruiseControl.Net to manage their automated builds and continuous integration. I’d heard of CI before, but never really understood it. Hearing it described that day, however, it immediately resonated with me.

I remember thinking:

Wow…this is how things ought to be done…this is the “right way”…

and then

…but I wouldn’t want to be the Build Master….that would really suck

Anyone care to guess what I spend a large percentage of my time on now?

Yep. Never one to leave an unclaimed responsibility on the table, it immediately became my mission to bring Continuous Integration back to my company. We even do database continuous integration now. All the databases can be dropped and recreated from source code with a single command. Yep, we do CI here. All the way to Eleven.

And me, well, I’m the Build Master.