In November 2018, we launched CircleCI orbs. I recently wrote about the design decisions we made while building a new package manager. Here, I want to share some of the lessons we learned (or re-learned) launching a major new feature. You likely won’t be surprised that we think a lot about how to ship working software, and our retro process helps us put in words what we observe and learn along the way.
Committing Dedicated but Contained Time to An Internal Proof-Of-Concept Was Invaluable
An internal deadline is a great motivator to stay focused on having a working prototype. In our case, it also gave us a clear but fairly low bar of “good enough” to test the concept. Coming out of the first major migration wave after the launch of CircleCI 2.0, we had a renewed interest in addressing the difficulties of bootstrapping and managing our new configuration format. In March 2018 (8 months prior to the marketing launch of orbs), we started the preliminary design work on orbs.