This series was co-written by Tyler Sullberg and Musa Barighzaai. CircleCI is growing, which is wonderful. However, one of the growth challenges we have is that our backend is primarily written in Clojure, and few developers know Clojure. Many CircleCI engineers, including myself, have learned Clojure on the job. Before joining CircleCI, I was a JavaScript developer. As the lingua franca of software engineers, JavaScript is a relatively straightforward language to learn.

Confidently testing in production is crucial for engineers to deliver software quickly. In this blog, we’ll discuss what our team at CircleCI has learned while changing our critical systems.

Software engineering teams have always looked for ways to increase code creation efficiency, reduce code vulnerabilities, and improve security processes. Many are now shifting security left, establishing security controls and testing — specifically integration testing — at an earlier phase in the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

CircleCI pipelines are defined in configuration files using the YAML syntax, which has been widely adopted by many software tools and solutions. YAML is a human-readable declarative data structure commonly used in configuration files and in applications where data is being stored or transmitted. The data in pipeline configuration files specifies and controls how workflows and jobs are executed when triggered on the platform.

At CircleCI, we’ve worked hard to build on-demand training to help our users get the most out of our platform and its capabilities. Historically, we created CircleCI Academy courses to ensure that all our customers know how to effectively use the features on our platform. Today, we’re taking a proactive approach to enhance your DevOps skills.