I am the chief software architect of a SaaS editor in france, and this is exactly what we do since 9 years+, and works well. Build numbering and tagging is done automatically on monday morning so QA can start week sprint testing on monday. We have a 3 month release cycle (except rare hotfixes). 2 month of feature dev, 2 weeks of feature completion and polishing then 2 weeks of code freeze where we test fully and document known issues. During the last phase we document, take some break and communicate the release changes to the customers. For customer release, we do 10% first wave, then 50% a week later and 100% few days later.

Loving these videos man! As I'm starting to look into building my first 'enterprise' system, having these different views on CI/CD, architecture and the pitfalls and benefits of different methods definitely helps! Thanks dude!

I put "gold standard" in quotes because trunk based development is just another development philosophy, often promoted by agile consultants. Everything has trade offs, so before you watch this video and think I'm saying every team should be doing this, I'm not. Use whatever approach works for your team and project needs. We use git flow at my workplace project and it works pretty well. We have shipped features to prod for years now using git flow. Research for yourself, ask chatGPT to compare git flow to trunk based development.

This helps a lot! especially for new devs out there, a request, if possible, could you please develop this flow/pipeline/CI-CD process from scratch for a small demo project. Thank you, there are less videos like this out there!

Thank you so much, i have an internship coming up and my recruiter gave me a bunch of courses and he expects me to know all this stuff by tommorow, this is a good summary to what I've learned so far

Crazy Cody. I used your icon generator recently for a build I'm working on. Thanks for this video.

Just recently found the channel and have been really enjoying these diagraming type videos! As a new grad software test engineer who wishes to become a dev. I would love to see some career oriented videos. Or your own career path would be great as well!

Cody, discussing your experience and thoughts is helpful for a small scale guy like me. Plenty to have in mind as things evolve....best of all you are open minded and just discussing the topic. Appreciate it

I am starting as a Jr. Software Eng next month in an enterprise company. Your large scale software development video and this helped a lot, I understand it might be different from team to team but at least I got to know the overview. Thank you!

Congratulations for your videos my friend! I am enjoying and learning!

Thanks Cody. Your "rambling" is actually quite refreshing and thought-provoking 👏. It provides those of us who are deeply entrenched in these processes with an opportunity to step back and gain a fresh perspective. I particularly want to emphasize one point that you've brought up. The development process becomes inherently more time-consuming when an organization is risk-averse. This gets even more complicated when the product is not only deployed as SaaS but also on-premise for some customers. Project managers find themselves needing release notes and translations that developers may not be able to produce. There are also other stackholders like the security team that may slow the process down.

I love these high level videos! Great content. Spot on with what we use.

I must say, it is a joy watching how you've increased in subscribers the last months, just goes to show that consistency and authenticity comes a long way. The approach you have is very refreshing, as you have been told before, it is enjoyable to witness the whole process, including errors/changing stuff mid video cause it didn't work as expected etc. So many videos are shown where everything works by defualt, which is rarely ever the case when you actually are developing something, at least to my experience.

Working on a similar setup with a team of more than 100 in a monorepo(I mean everyone commits to master in one repo) and it’s has saved us many headaches around gitflow. But as you mentioned it’s simple to explain but the devil is in the detail. If you’ve not done it before it can lol overwhelming as in many areas you might have to build and improve your tooling setup to assist in the entire flow. Tooling really helps

holy shit I love these kind of videos. thank you for giving us a high-level view of the sdlc process

im glad i procrastinated on implementing concepts from previous video! thanks man, this is very helpful

As usual always on point about real life software development. The thing that is often not taken into account is that you might introduce features or not corresponding to the client expectation because of not enough details. Which are working features ( so they are not triggering any test flag) it's just that the client is unsatisfied. It happens a lot (especially in agile) which is why i prefer the graph that you detailed on your previous video. Also on some project you just cant accept to have bug in prod. It comes down to what you were saying at the beginning, Every approach have trade off.

Thanks again. keep churning these vids man.

great video! my friend and i, both new to web dev, launched a newspaper like app to our school last year and this video would have solved much of problems lol the explanation is very straightforward, thanks for sharing your knowledge!

If you keep making videos like this I will watch every single one of them. This is such a good way of explaining things.

I really like the brief comparison of options with a "this is what I do".

Amazing video! Please, keep making them, it’s super educative

48 seconds in and I'm already learning stuff a 4 year degree didn't teach me. Subscribed & liked. Keep up the great work.

wow! These videos are really informative for me. I had just broken into tech as a machine learning engineer from a non technical background. Honestly, these videos explaining the fundamentals of real world software development are life savers for someone like me. Really appreciate the effort!! 🖖

These are so good - not sure if you're calling this a 'series' but these are great vids.

Another element to this process is adding monitors/alarms to each stage. You deploy to a beta or preprod and a workflow bakees for say an hour. If your monitors don’t alert, your pipeline deploys to the next stage, if it does alert you configure it to automatically rollback to the previous revision

Nice videos!! Thank you for sharing your experience!

There's some great information in this video thank you very much for sharing!

Thanks man. Awesome video. Keep it up!

Absolutely loved this and your other video on larger scale development. I'm starting my first SWE position working on a large enterprise product soon, and I really wish this type of information was covered more in my education. Been pretty nervous because this is a huge step forward from the smaller, hackier programming assignments and projects I worked on in school and my free time. Your videos help ease that anxiety and make me excited about figuring all of this out! Thanks man!

hell yes another great workflow video 🔥🔥🔥

I prefer your approach from the last vid. Great to see the different options out there that people are using though. This wouldn't work for us, because our features usually take anywhere from 3 to 10 days to build. We have a main, dev, qa and staging branch, and when a dev works on a new feature/ticket, they checkout from main (which is the most stable branch as it is what is on production). There are times when it is beneficial to checkout from staging, but it is case dependent.

Fantastic work! You covered all the points well 🎉 I was wondering if you were going to mention canaries but you did at the end. Superb job

It's actually good to see the full chaos of deployment possibilities. Ramble on! Devs need to see this.

Can you go into further detail about the GH actions part of the flow? Like go into an example of building with docker and testing, etc. Please and thanks!

worked in a bank in italy, they basically had 3 separate 'dev' environments where we could tesT/deploy our features, then 1 pre-prod env where users did the UAT and then the prod env. great video. tnx

Very valuable information to someone like me who just started learning about these things. Thank you

Noice vid :) Idea for a next topic: diving deeper into deploying to multiple environments, with different configurations, using artifacts instead of rebuilding for each env. etc

Nice work man! Respect

Build a project for an NGO as a volunteer, its actually my first real world project. I recruited a couple of remote devs (volunteers) to help put too, and the project was successfully deployed. After a couple of months learning here and there I feel like improving the project with latest techs and just doing things better. Having these videos is just amazing, I know have an idea of how to do it right, with less to no interference. Also I'm planning to one day to start up a tech start-up, having this insights as early as know is just life saver and will make life easier in the long run and decision making. That's Cody and keep doing what you do pal

Great overview. Thanks!

This is gold, thanks for the content.

Huge help! Thank you so much.

Working in product I needed that!!

Very useful video thank you so much and please keep it going ❤

I love these cody please keep them up

you should make a video showing how this code is/ and kept secure during these processes. that would be cool. especially for us on the cyber security side of things.

This video is a fucking lifesaver. Been trying to figure out all of this stuff on my own and it's reassuring to know that most of the processes I came up with myself also turned out to be popular processes currently used in the industry.

Well done video that goes beyond the basic principles

I have been loving these style videos.

Thanks for sharing 👍

Sometimes QA is required by contract (i.e. government funded projects) and testing a feature might require a ton of functional steps to be performed before you can reach that feature. The setup work needed for testing might be difficult to set up on unit tests or integration tests.

This is really cool. I’ve never had a job on a team. I just do solo projects and it’s really rad to learn how these flows work. 🤙🏼🤙🏼🤙🏼

You know, you might want to make sure the stakeholders get the full context of the application, otherwise they might not sign off on stuff to go into prod, so what you can do is make a separate branch that runs parallel to main, and when it gets pushed, there's an automatic build and deployment to an exclusive environment only the devs can access. And then the devs could branch off of this dev-exclusive branch to work on their features, and make sure everything is bundled together in a single release to pre-prod. And then, you could have a temporary branch for releasing to pre-prod, so you can push any last-minute bug fixes before it gets to the stake holders, and of course that would merge into both dev and main simultaneously to keep everything up to date. But that process is getting a bit cumbersome, so to keep agility high, we can also have branches for hotfixes that branch off of main, and after we fix the bug it gets merged back into main and dev to keep everything up to date. _phew_ we did it boys, we fixed trunk-based development. Wait...

Great video! as I said in the other one, I think ppl dont understand working on large scale enterprise cous every company does it somehow different, so its great that you explain things at large scale (like enterprise) cous nobody teaches that and when a dev its just in a small team pushing pretty much to production and finds he's way into a company, they are cluless of how things work

These videos are super useful.

This is best ❤ Thanks Wdc

I don't know how to say thank you enough, I shared this with my team, we read a business book on blitzscaling and one quote from mark zurkerberg was move fast and break things, we're at that point now 😂, so we're using the trunk based approach right now, but I see us moving slowly moving towards more complex setups cos of the nature of our application

Thanks man 👊👏

Excellent advice. Here are some things I'd be interested in hearing about, if you understand them: - Continuous delivery vs Continuous deployment(drawbacks of continuous deployment without continuous delivery) - Other version control systems, mainly SVN, from the perspective of developer experience. - Workflow comparison between CI tools(mainly gh actions, gitlab CI and jenkins)

The team could be doing CI into the dev branch too, but then feature flagging needs to be set up, so as an unfinished feature doesn't cause havoc for the rest of the process.

keep doing these! thanks!

Brilliantly simplified

This is the best channel I found in years

..tnx .. valuable input 👌🏾

very helpful for starting devs. Its not that easy to find vids on overall dev process

We working like this but without release tags & feature flags. So our pipelines is semi-automatic - build after pushing changes and manual deploy to test & rc env and then similar process after merging request into main branch

just wonderful!!

If a commit into main or not introduces a bug locally the solution is super simple. You reset, it takes seconds and after notifying the author you go back to work.

The devil is in the details. LOL.. Awesome! Thank you for your videos. I like how I can see that diagram unfolding on a daily basis. It's great to have this presented in a diagrammatic perspective.

awesome video!

Nice. Can you share a little insight about user story and how to make it for us the junior? Really appreciated that 🙌

Helpful video

Thank you. We use regular git flow at our company for building web apps. Usually FE devs build the UI using the API deployed to the dev env so they don't need to run the API locally using docker and they don't need keep the local database data up to date with the latest features. I am just wondering how this might be achieved using the trunk based development.

Continuous delivery vs automated delivery. The goal is to have one or more deployable commit every day, not necessarily to deploy every day. This allows for manual control over things like... not deploying when you are short-staffed or deploying while key team members are not available.

I like to look at the Linux kernel development as a kind of development. A massive project where the price you pay for a bug is a kernel crash/reboot. This development tends to favor feature branches.

14:48 haha The best part is describing product managers as "... it's basically just people who want to check things off on a checkbox".

u describe it very well sir

Please make more of these types of videos

Gold video, keep it up :)

Main challenge is to know what all the hype words mean. I guess I have spent a decade naming branches feature, but doing trunk based. It seems obvious that 3 weeks work on a branch is likely to lead to merge pains. If you have long running branches it’s your job to rebase regularly

Very nice!

One thing a lot of people miss is if your product has multiple live versions or not. If you’re product has multiple live versions, like 1.1, 1.2, 2.0, etc., then trunk based dev may be more challenging. You will need to be able build the product for any version at any time to fix a bug or security issue. Now, if you only have one live version, like most web apps or services, trunk based development is ideal.

Good job babe!!! You changed post time on me!

Now make a video on other developer workflows and where do junior devs fit in like join this whole cycle like on the far left of the canvas?! Or how we might learn more about these cycles!

Well done, you basically explained my dev process. What I did though is when I tag say v1.0.0, it kicks off a build and pushes to Docker Hub. Then another action updates an ArgoCD manifest to automatically update the container in a staging Kubernetes cluster and push updates to Slack that it's done. When I'm done testing staging version, then I just tag a release so without the v and it pushes and updates to my production cluster. It's automated enough that I don't even feel like I'm managing anything, I just code.

(Edit I was too quick you basically describe a similar workflow as I did here): Yeah basically you set up a CI that does integrations tests (indeed more important than unit tests) on a PR, and only when the PR succeeds a pull request goes through.

Very cool, thanks!!

One thing you could cover is the structure of the projects itself. What i mean - monerepos vs multirepos. How do you split your repositories. Namespaces. What belongs to Infra, what belongs to Dev/Build/Whatever. What belongs to Application. From the perspective of Day 0 bootstrapping. New rack/AWS account. You just plugged servers in the rack/wall socket. How do you structure entire work. Where does goes seed secrets and it's IaC. Etc. One thing is that you already have Infra in place. But another thing is how to get to this point. From the realm of "How do you collaborate if there is no Git server yet? How do you provision Git server if there is no Image factory. How do you harden images if there is no secret store and PKI? How do you test images if there is no servers installed?" But specifically from the PoV of project (Git repo) structure, without going into file structure itself. And another thing is how do you align developers local environment for his own local fast iteration without going trough the whole pipeline.

00:05 I love hearing this

In a huge projects it could become a merges-hell approach. When there is always a challenge to merge your code. It can take days of developers time.

Pure Gold

The question coming soon is which method works better for AI feature addition. I think probably Gitflow is more suited for isolating new features generated, tested and documented by AI before merging. We just need good AI business analyst workflow.

Imo for 80% of companies feature flagging or dark shipping is mostly fine. I think once you get in to SLA’s with required uptimes it becomes more prudent to have a slower time to production cycle

great video.

thank you

can you go into more detail about the tests, how they are made, what do the tests mostly target etc

01:09 🧩 Trunk-based development promotes continuous integration by merging multiple pull requests to the main branch daily. 03:13 🔄 Trunk-based development encourages knowledge sharing among developers through daily code reviews and understanding of changing features. 08:40 🚀 Trunk-based development aims for low deployment time and rapid feedback for bug fixes and feature requests. 11:58 🚧 Use feature flags to deploy unfinished features to production and involve stakeholders and QA for testing. 14:07 👩‍💻 Adding additional deployment environments like pre-prod can help mitigate risks and ensure proper verification of features before deploying to production.

Can you cover a variable array of states? I've been struggling for months with state management in react because my components are in arrays.

I am curious about your thoughts regarding JIRA (or alternative if there is anything remotely useful) and documentation of features/releases.