I feel like I owe a special thanks to the HN community. You guys were CircleCI's first customers, and we learned almost everything we know about building a business and having happy customers from HN. This community is amazing, and so much of our success is due to you guys!
The best thing about Circle for me is how fast it is, but more importantly, how fast it appears to be. Some of it I can attribute to clever tech (running tests in parallel in multiple containers for the same build is something that never occurred to us), but a major part is also clever UX.
Congrats to Paul and the rest of the team! I have been recommending CircleCI to all of my dev friends ever since my first experience with it over a year ago.
We had a pretty tricky front end testing setup with our Rails app, due primarily to some bleeding edge javascript interactions that needed to be tested in a headless browser. It took ages to get right locally, so I had zero confidence that Circle would handle it. I set up our repo and promptly forgot about, as I was traveling out to SF for Startup School 2012.
While waiting in the lobby of YC for the pre-event dinner, I got an email from Circle (actually, from Paul) that our repo was ready and all tests were passing. PASSING?! Whoa. As I read it, I looked up from my phone and Paul was standing in front of me. I wanted to give him a hug, but I settled for a friendly thank you and a handshake. =)
For us, it just worked. I'm a one-man engineering team at a startup, so I don't have the resources to devote to running an in-house CI setup. Circle took care of it for us, and their UI and features are just perfect.
We use Circle at my Rails consultancy. They make us more productive, which in turn helps us work from wherever we want—a coffeeshop near home or anywhere in the world.
Also, we're using Circle to help with a project for monthly life skills training workshops. Not only will this project save the workshop staff 180 hours a month, but will also make it far easier for trainees to register for the workshop. Circle is, indirectly, working to make thousands of people's lives better each year.
Congratulations Circle, we're really happy for you guys!
Does Circle have a way to give builds more RAM yet? We really liked Circle when we first tried it at Conspire but the 2GB cap meant we couldn't stay with it and we've been fighting Jenkins on a daily basis ever since. Our tests involve spinning up 5-6 JVMs to simulate an Akka cluster so we need a lot of RAM.
The limit has since been bumped to 4G. We don't have a way to change this per-customer yet, but we're not as tightly constrained for RAM as we used to be, so we could probably negotiate something if you really need more.
A few times a week is decides to re-download all our dependencies for reasons we haven't been able to figure out. That's the big one we've been dealing with right now.
Super excited to see this news and what the CircleCI team have planned. Can't overstate how much I love CircleCI or how much easier it makes my life. Definitely one of the best services I use day to day.
CircleCI made possible a fundamental change in our dev process. It is now an integral part of our QA process and is present at every step of development.
Saw these folks at CloudBeat last year. Thought their pitch was terrible but OMG did I love the product (I still thought they should've won!).
Really glad to see they successfully raised a series A. I believe it was Paul who pitched and when I went up to him afterwards I was blown away by how humble, polite and just plain nice he was. Wishing these folks the best of luck :).
Am I right that it only supports github repos? Because however awesome github is, I just prefer not to count how many repos I have.
In other words, does it support any git repo? Can't find it anywhere on their pages.
Would make me sad not to be able to use circleci, which has straight forward use and value prop.
We've been using CircleCI for a few weeks and it's been a great experience. The product is great and their customer service was awesome - they got back to me almost immediately to help me fix a bug on my end. Great stuff!
Congratulations! We've been happily using CircleCI as part our test/deploy workflow for a few months. Github and Hipchat integration works great, the web UI is easy to use, and ssh and parallelization are nice bonuses.
Congrats Paul, Allen and team. It's been a pleasure to see CircleCi grow into the incredible fast CI service with a real detail in the UX of integrating into developer workflow.
We use CircleCI heavily at Wave. Love their parallelization feature - we brought a 25 minute test run down to 12. We could speed that up another 4x or so if we felt like throwing more money at it.
We've been on CircleCI for months now and in addition to being an absolutely fabulous product the support has been astounding. Congrats guys, well deserved.
I personally pay for Codeship for my own projects, and we pay/use CircleCI at up.co. I love both. Both have given us pain in random edge cases where things just don't work, which is frustrating. Both have provided amazing support whenever we needed it. Both have all of the technical needs we require. Both accommodate the exact same Github-based workflow with Heroku & Hipchat.
My suggestion: flip a coin. Or choose based on something arbitrary like which website design you like more. They are both great startups that deserve your business.
CircleCI is really neat, going to ditch the slow CloudBees build server as soon as CircleCI gets the last remaining issues sorted out. Hope the money lets them hire someone who can write proper docs and changelogs :-)
