Civo Navigate North America Recap

The Dagger team spent a few days in Austin this week at the Civo Navigate conference. It was great to see the thriving Austin tech community show up in full force to talk about platform engineering, infrastructure, Kubernetes, AI, and the future of DevOps. 

The event kicked off with a fireside chat with our co-founder, Solomon, and the Civo CEO and CTO Mark and Dinesh. They did a great job facilitating the discussion and giving Solomon the chance to tell his story. Solomon shared his journey from hacking in his mom’s basement in Paris, to moving to the Bay Area to attend Y Combinator, to watching Dockerachieve “violent product market fit”, going from a thing that no one cared about to something that everyone cared about overnight. He talked about the psychology of creating a new way of doing things and the importance of not being afraid to look ridiculous. 

The conversation then shifted to Solomon sharing more about the iterative process of generating the idea for Dagger along with co-founders Sam and Andrea, which involved speaking to hundreds of developers to find out what hurts the most. Later, during a brief Q&A, Solomon gave advice on how to approach building an open source business. When asked why they chose to work on a CI/CD problem in a world where there were already dozens of players, he gave the simple answer that he was surprised himself that the problem remained unsolved. While every other part of the software development process takes advantage of software development best practices and modern tooling, CI seems to have been frozen for the last 20 years and we are all stuck with thousands of lines of YAML, inline bash scripts, and a feedback loop that is way too slow. Overall, it was a wonderful discussion and one worth catching as soon as Civo posts it on their YouTube Channel. 

This message resonated with many of the attendees and the conversation continued at our booth. Many folks we talked to were Austin locals and it was amazing to see how diverse and thriving the tech industry is in Austin. We met everyone from bootstrapped founders, to mid-sized startups, to folks working on physical networking infrastructure in the defense industry. Even though the size and shape of these companies varied greatly, it was interesting to see that almost everyone is dealing with the same problems when it comes to CI. They are all living with slow builds and YAML hell. It was exhilarating to chat with them, hear more about their current state of the world, show them the latest and greatest features of Dagger and make plans to continue working together to remove the toil from their existing CI/CD process. 

Two common themes emerged from our conversations:

Configuration as (actual) Code. 

While the term Configuration as Code has been thrown around a lot over the last decade, we have somehow fooled each other into thinking that at best some provider-specific DSL is code, and at worst, that YAML is code. When we talk about describing your CI/CD pipeline as code, we mean an actual programming language such as Go, Python, or Typescript. 

DRY

Don’t Repeat Yourself is an important principle of software engineering that seems to apply to every aspect except for CI because it's littered with wasteful and repetitive configuration. In addition, due to the complexity of caching, most CI executions are constantly repeating time-consuming steps to set up the environment, wasting time and money. 

These two themes are best practices for modern CI and are what allows anyone to achieve the same type of results that companies such as Airbyte, Grafana, and even the Civo team themselves, have been enjoying.

Overall, the event was refreshing, and the Dagger team is heading back to our respective homes feeling more motivated than ever to continue our work and fix CI once and for all. We want to thank the Civo team for organizing the event, all the other sponsors for helping to make it happen, and of course each and every attendee who spent time with us. We are looking forward to the next one.