Blacksmith

We see our customers reach for GitHub Actions for all sorts of use cases, be it to lint, build, test, deploy or notify. This makes it one of the most common runaway costs at an organization. In some cases, the $$ paid for CI compute, rivals what is spent on production deployments! We wrote an easy guide for how you can save serious money without giving up on what the platform has to offer. Link in the comments ⬇️

When you're sitting in every developers hot-path, reliability is table-stakes. At Blacksmith, we're obsessed with uptime so your team can ship with confidence. It is particularly special when that is noticed by our customers. Fernando Battistella at Finch has been a pleasure to work with!

Blacksmith is hiring our first founding engineer! We graduated from YC less than 9 months ago and we've grown 50% MoM on average since then — we've almost 6x'ed our revenue in the last 4 months alone. We're currently managing a hardware fleet of more than 7000 cores, typically running hundreds of concurrent jobs for over 150 companies who trust Blacksmith with their entire CI workload. And we're just getting started. Blacksmith was founded on the bet that CI, as a class of workloads, is primed to be expatriated out of the hyperscalers (AWS, GCP, Azure). We have an ambitious roadmap in front of us, to go after an equally large opportunity. We're looking for a strong generalist who's interested in getting their hands dirty across the stack — from optimizing our VMs' performance for our customers to building performant observability dashboards in React. If you or someone in your network seems like they could be a good fit, please send me, Aditya Maru or Aditya Jayaprakash a note!

Folks at AtoB have done a great job of sharding their test suite. However, concurrency limits and runner provisioning times were negatively impacting their ability to ship 🚢 That is, until Gireesh Bandlamudi and team moved over to Blacksmith! We're very happy to be powering their CI.

Whether it is running your tests in different environments, sharding your test suite or multi-architecture Docker builds, the matrix feature offered by GitHub Actions is extremely useful. As your CI pipeline grows, it is inevitable that you will reach for matrix builds. When you do, check out our guide on how to best set them up! Link in the comments

We parked a truck in front of KubeCon, here's what it taught us about B2B Sales 👇

There's nothing like a happy customer! Thank you Aditya Maru and the Blacksmith team 💜 Check out our config inheritance feature to see what the hype is about: https://lnkd.in/g8VJTFYC

It's no chat.com...but fastergithubactions.com

Aditya Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah, and I are going to be at KubeCon in Salt Lake City from 12th-15th November! We're still working our way up to a booth (maybe next year 😛) but we're excited to meet with as many folks as we can, this time around. Topics we can talk your ear off with include GitHub Actions, self hosting, orchestrating bare metal machines, slow tests and YCombinator. Message us if you want to grab a coffee/drink any of those days!

From AWS, to Heroku and then more recently with Fly.io and Railway - each provider has its own strengths and weaknesses, all of them leaving more to be desired. I've written some thoughts about why I think backend/infra deployments still suck, and why I'm jealous of my frontend colleagues and their Vercel deploys. Link in the comments.