We’ve launched a new Android template in Bitbucket Pipelines. This template helps you automate building and testing an Android project in a Docker container, using Gradle as your build tool. Access the template code here or go to the Pipelines tab of your repo and select the Android template. This blog walks you through how this template is structured and has tips on how you can scale it.

Get stories about tech and teams in your inbox Our brains are simply not equipped to handle all the information we’re trying to stuff into them. That’s the (paraphrased) sentiment of Dominican friar Vincent of Beauvais, a 13th-century monk, who was struggling to manage “the multitude of books, the shortness of time and the slipperiness of memory.” It seems the printing press was burying old Beauvais in a never-ending pile of text. What’s a monk to do?

At Atlassian, we believe that the future will be led by innovation and technology. Particularly now, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we can see just how integral the tech industry has become, interwoven into every facet of our lives. As technology becomes indispensable, it is inevitable and appropriate that governments take steps to mitigate the risk factors from this deep integration of digital technologies into our day-to-day lives. Get stories like this in your inbox.

Bitbucket Cloud’s pull request sidebar is useful because it displays all the relevant details of the pull request you’re looking at. However, with so much information present, it can be hard to find the information you need. To address feedback we’ve received about its readability and usability, we’ve given it a redesign.

Bitbucket Pipelines now allows steps with a manual trigger to be used in parallel groups, satisfying one of the highest voted feature requests. This feature provides more flexibility in Pipelines, allowing teams to configure pipelines with multiple options and then only run the steps they actually need to run, at the time they want. For example you can choose which environments should be deployed for individual developers, giving them different environments to test and do their work.

One of the most critical activities for a developer is reviewing code. Code review helps developers fix bugs before shipping, learn about the codebase, and pass along a team’s values to new (and longstanding) developers. To double down on these benefits, we’re releasing a new tool to facilitate communication between pull request reviewers and authors: PR Reviewer Status. Until now, Bitbucket has only had one reviewer status: Approved.

Fake news spreads six times faster than factual news. The algorithms built into social media software, in an effort to hold our attention, feed us information that triggers the basest instincts of our complex psychologies. These are some of the starkest realities exposed in the Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma.” Holding our attention is what the robot (if you will) was programmed to do. And it’s doing its job really, really well.

We are excited to bring you our new and improved pull request experience. The entire Bitbucket engineering team has been enjoying the experience and are looking forward to you trying it. In the coming weeks, we'll begin to enroll more people into the new experience with the option to switch back to the old view if needed.

Docker recently announced that, starting November 1 2020, pull rate limits will apply to anonymous image pulls from Docker Hub. For anonymous (unauthenticated) users, pull rates are limited based on the individual IP address, and therefore some service disruption was expected for Docker Hub users. Bitbucket is working with Docker to ensure that Bitbucket Pipelines users can continue transparently using Docker Hub without rate limits nor any configuration.

Last October, I published a blog post describing the efforts we've committed to on the Bitbucket Cloud engineering team to achieve world-class reliability. A lot has happened in the past year (understatement of the year)! What the team has accomplished is tremendous, but we've also learned a thing or two that we can work further to improve.