Taking Buildkite from a side project to a global company
6 comments
·September 7, 2025exidy
kawsper
It also allowed us (a small startup) to run huge test suites, on cheap dedicated hardware from Hetzner, without sacrificing the developer experience.
It was the bill I was the happiest to pay.
We used Knapsack Pro to efficiently parallelise our Ruby test suite.
Today, I still use Buildkite, but now I build golden images (with packer) and deploy them with terraform.
Cyph0n
> In 2019 we raised a Series A of $28 million. The reason we did that was because I wanted to buy a house.
Haha, love it.
An inspirational story for sure!
patapong
> The products I built with Claude are worse than without them because I use programming as a way to think and interact with the problem. When you're coding, you're deeply invested in the problem you're solving, getting intimate with the problem. With AI tools, it's surface level. It's a one-night stand with a problem versus a deep and meaningful relationship.
A very interesting insight about AI coding. It gets at the theory building part of programming, which is much harder to do when just supervising an AI in my experience. On the other hand, I am so much faster that it's hard not to use AI for coding. Interested to see what they come up with!
stock_toaster
I used to really like buildkite, but their pricing has gotten kind of wild. Guess they are only chasing large cap orgs these days.
sqs
Buildkite is awesome, by far the best CI product and with an amazing team.
I love BuildKite. It might seem obvious now but I feel like BK had two key ideas -- fully declarative pipelines and a hybrid SaaS control plane / customer-managed workers concept that made it so much easier to deploy into large enterprises. That combined with a UI that was clear and a pleasure to work with.
I do wonder how BK will continue in a world that's increasingly dominated by GitHub and and other integrated solutions, but I hope as long as there's a market for quality tools, BK will survive and thrive.