Build, Deploy, and Merge Queues at Scale with Jon Block

“Engineers don’t always like merge queue because they have to wait longer for their PRs to merge. But the trade-off is that the quality of those merges will be higher, and the company will have less downtime and outages,” says Jon Block, founder of LowRouchAdvisor. 

Using a merge queue is like wearing a seatbelt, he adds, the only responsible thing to do for large engineering organizations that ship products that matter.

Jon also shares best practices and lessons learned about scaling build and deploy from his 26 years of experience. 

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Developer Experience and Scaling Repositories
01:37 Managing Repositories in Large Organizations
05:24 Monorepo vs. Multirepo: Pros and Cons
07:53 Challenges of Merge Queues and Deployment at Scale
13:02 GitHub Merge Queue Limitations and Solutions
15:36 Batching, Stability, and Deployment Strategies
19:16 Train Method of Deployment and Rollbacks
22:37 Build Systems, Bazel, and Build Avoidance
23:20 Impact of Flaky Tests and Automation
28:46 Adopting Merge Queues and Cultural Challenges
34:11 AI in Development: Opportunities and Risks
37:41 Closing Remarks and Resources

About Jon Block
Jon Block has spent 26 years in software engineering, nearly all of it at high-growth startups. He has served as VP of Engineering and CTO multiple times and today advises engineering organizations through his firm, Low Touch Advisors.

About Hangar DX (https://dx.community/)
The Hangar is a community of senior DevOps and senior software engineers focused on developer experience. This is a space where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas, share hard-earned wisdom, troubleshoot issues, and ultimately help each other in their projects and careers.

We invite developers who work in DX and platform teams at their respective companies or who are interested in developer productivity.

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