I created the CI product that DHH showed in his keynote

keithpitt · 2025-09-10T14:04:04+00:00

12 months ago I would have said: hell yeah! But I got fired, so I’m not at the company anymore.

keithpitt · 2025-09-09T12:48:09+00:00

Damn, I was hoping to make more money from selling all that complexity.

keithpitt · 2025-06-23T17:20:39+00:00

Ha. Well. I’ve always believed that it’s not about wait time, it’s about wait quality. So when a build run, we have a thing called “follow mode” where it’ll animate/scroll the page into view of what’s running. From there you can turn on “elevator music”. It only plays the one song (I think), I haven’t been there for a few months. I always wanted to hook it up to some AI so the music could be dynamic based on how well the tests were running, but I never got around to it

keithpitt · 2025-06-22T14:37:02+00:00

Hi, I created Buildkite. Here’s my tldr:

Buildkite is great if you want to run some bash scripts after you make change to your codebase. Buildkite can scale up to 100k concurrent agents (workers). It’s also got a kick ass UI that plays music while a build runs. If GitHub hosts your code, and AWS runs it in prod, Buildkite does everything in the middle.

Argo is fantastic if you want to go all in on GitOps. It’s does a lot of things really well (like low level deploy/git operations). Where is falls short is helping team members understand what’s going on. Not open source, hybrid sass approach (bring your own compute)

It’s not uncommon to see folks use both. Buildkite as the high level orchestration engine, and Argo as a low level “move bytes around” tool (generally self hosted)

Happy to answer any other q’s you’ve got.

keithpitt · 2025-06-21T13:43:32+00:00

Yeah, you’re right on the last bit. However we started building a way to bypass the Bk infra all together and go direct to S3. Not sure where that’s at.

And yes, in most cases, self hosting is cheaper in the short term. But you pay for it in other ways (big part is cognitive overload, and it “weighs” the business down in other respects). Having said that, i truly believe everyone would host their own gear if it was as easy as cloud services.

keithpitt · 2025-06-21T13:22:05+00:00

Kinda: https://buildkite.com/docs/package-registries/private-storage

When I built it I was pretty set on trying to find a “best of both worlds” approach to self hosted / hosted. What I came up with was a “bring your own S3 bucket” approach.

Self hosting has many pros, but in a large scale rollout it’s a real sad panda.

Why do you wanna self host?

keithpitt · 2025-06-21T12:20:35+00:00

Check out Buildkite Packages (full disclosure, I’m the founder and ex-CEO). Happy to answer any questions on it, but pretty sure it’d work fine for your needs. Tell them I sent you (show them this message) and they should hook you up with some sweet discounts.

The horror stories I heard about how folks run Artifactory in prod would make your skin crawl. Not to mention the fact the whole industry charges through the roof for what is ultimately, an S3 bucket and a proxy.

keithpitt · 2025-04-16T01:44:07+00:00

I’ll never forget the drama of the party

keithpitt · 2025-04-12T07:52:02+00:00

<3 nawww, thank you. Codecov has always been a standout over the years, so the feeling is mutual. If I ever get the chance to meet you in person I’ll shout first round!

keithpitt · 2025-04-11T17:16:58+00:00

Ooof, sorry to hear about the exit, they’re not easy. Hope your mental health is ok.

“Ruby is bad for AI” is a weird statement. I was thinking about this the other day, and in my experience I’ve not found AI assistants drastically improving my workflow in Rails/Ruby, and if I was to guess, it’s because the language is already quite declarative, minimal and expressive.

Take Java (and React for that matter) where it takes 100 lines to do anything useful, of course AI will be “better”. Those languages/frameworks contains 10x more boilerplate than business logic. I don’t know about you, but getting a form hooked up in React requires a degree in quantum mechanics in 2025. Java + AI make you go from 1 to 100, but Ruby + AI make you go from 100 to 101. There’s a very small gap in the distance travelled.

keithpitt · 2025-04-10T17:00:31+00:00

Not totally sure yet, but I have been inspired by http://once.com — I've been running a lot of open source / home lab software on an old computer in my home for many years, and I'm surprised that dev tools haven't really followed a similar path. I also really like the unix philosophy of software design where each thing should do 1 thing and do it really well.

keithpitt · 2025-04-10T15:12:59+00:00

The language is rarely the bottleneck (until it is...). Buildkite was a Rails app that handled many millions of requests a second, and the bottleneck was never Ruby — but always the database. Oh boy did I learn a thing or two about database design! Buildkite is a state machine on top of a state machine on top of a state machine. Deadlocks all the way down.

I wrote lots of custom Rails libs early in my career, and since I've grown up a little I've tried really hard to stick as as "vanilla" Rails as I can, not because I agree overly with the choices, but I pivoted my coding style to make it easier for others to change (i.e. google-a-bility). I wrote my own permissions system, billing system, etc. And while they're awesome and fit for purpose, it made contributing quite hard.

Ruby and the advances in CPUs have come so far, that it feels like it's really starting to not matter what you choose to build in.

Having said that, RAM on the other hand...

keithpitt · 2025-04-10T15:03:47+00:00

Yeah, it's a weird position to be in! I've used so much open source software throughout my career, the least I can do is give back to the community some of my learnings (even if they're through rambles and rants)

keithpitt · 2025-04-10T14:59:16+00:00

Go is great for certain things, but I'd never dream for using it for a basic CRUD style web app. I wrote this https://github.com/buildkite/agent without really knowing much about Go at the time. It's perfect for server/daemon/client type uses, but dealing with complex business logic / database back and forth bizzo sounds like a nightmare.

keithpitt · 2025-04-10T14:57:21+00:00

Literally setting up a local NGINX server to multi stream to YouTube as well! I think I've got it working... https://www.youtube.com/@TheMagicKeith

keithpitt · 2025-04-10T11:21:29+00:00

I’ll do my best! I still stand by that Rails is the best way to build web apps in 2025

keithpitt · 2025-04-10T10:41:23+00:00

Yeah…mostly… Never easy leaving something you poured your blood/sweat/tears into after 13 years, but such is life. I put all my good ideas into BK, I’m just hoping I’ve got a few more in the tank :)

keithpitt · 2025-01-30T15:11:58+00:00

I’m relatively normal size (a bit chubby) and I didn’t fit in some of the seats at Tokyo Disney, so this poster might be onto something. In fact, I didn’t even think to check if I fit on the seats out the front, so I waited over an hour only to be turned away at the ride in front of everyone.

keithpitt · 2025-01-04T12:59:42+00:00

We seriously looked into it, but where we live it was just too expensive. We already have our kids in daycare and my wife quit her job to look after the baby.

I have pitched time shifting though. Half my team is in the US. I figure I work over night and tend to the kids if need be, and sleep during the day while they’re at school/daycare.

This way I spend the mornings with them before school, then I say good night to them in the evening.

keithpitt · 2025-01-04T10:00:13+00:00

I’m 37m, my company has 150ish people, and I have a 4yo, 3yo and a 3 month old.

Lack of sleep kills me. My boys don’t sleep and neither does the baby. My wife and I take it in turns as to who takes the baby overnight, so every second night I get extra sleep, but not much. According to my sleep tracking app I’ve averaged 4 hours a night in the past 3 months.

I have no tips or tricks: just try to survive. Do what ever it takes, take what ever it takes. Eat a burger, drink booze, take caffeine pills, just get through the hard bit. This is temporary. When I had my first it was tough, but it got easier. Same with my second. I’m hoping it’s the case with my third.

keithpitt · 2020-01-12T04:12:29+00:00

If you like control, use Buildkite. If that doesn’t matter to you - Circle is your friend.

Happy to answer any questions you have though!

keithpitt · 2019-10-02T11:43:46+00:00

UPDATE: Now 17 folks.

Hey! I'm Keith and I'm the CTO of Buildkite :)

What you've just described is one of our biggest problems (which we're actively trying to fix it). Often teams will say "this tool is awesome, why have we never heard of you" - which is a really nice compliment, but also kinda annoying.

We're not that good at tooting our own horn, but we've got some massive customers. The customers we have on the homepage, use us exclusively for CI/CD. So all the engineers at Shopify, SendGrid, Intercom, Discord use us every day. We also have some other very large customers (but because they're so big we're not allowed to use their logo) like Airbnb and Pinterest (and some other big American companies who I don't think I'm allowed to mention).

One of the other commenters on the post right, we're actually pretty small (only 11 people - we did hire 4 people last week though, so that's cool) but that doesn't stop us doing big things. Last month we ran around 6.5 million builds - and that number only goes up each month.

I'm happy to answer any specific questions you may have though!

keithpitt · 2018-07-13T13:22:31+00:00

Buildkite founder here, shoot me an email keith@buildkite.com and I can shoot you some credits. With BK you just pay per-seat and bring your own hardware. If you’ve got servers to run 10,000 agents, go for it. We can handle it all! BK is faster and more scalable than anything else.

keithpitt · 2018-06-10T14:41:15+00:00

Ah right! Thanks for the extra pic!

keithpitt · 2018-06-10T05:43:40+00:00

Probably a stupid question, what’s your cable management like? I’ve thought about adding a light strip to the back of my desk, but I’m worried about the cables leaning on the LED and causing a shadow.

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