Bunkers Blog

 How big of an impact can a fully automated CI/CD process have for your engineering team? What are the benefits, and what does it take to get it going? Years ago, I worked on a cloud platform with numerous microservices and the teams supporting them. Quarterly, usually during an engineering all-hands meeting, someone would inevitably ask why we didn't automate our release process. Our engineering leader, facing a mountain of legacy code with minimal automated tests (Unit, Integration, you name it), would say it was too risky. "We'd just be releasing more bad code faster," they'd argue. The solution, they felt, was for every team to build automated tests for all that legacy code. That usually ended the conversation. Since then, I've implemented automated CI/CD on several SaaS platforms, and I can tell you there's a way to do it without rewriting your entire codebase. Why Automate? The Benefits Are Real. Automated tooling like CI/CD ensures consistency a...

Everyone is searching for the most efficient and effective way to use AI in software development. So how do we take advantage of AI and where is the best place to start?   AI excels at generating code, but it's not always perfect for what you are looking for.  Ensuring consistency, adhering to code patterns, and maintaining structure requires engineers with experience. Based on my experience, approximately 90% of AI-generated code still needs some modifications or tweaking to align with best practices, scalability, and ongoing maintainability. This is where experienced engineers play a critical role in shaping AI-assisted code into production-ready solutions. AI as a Strategic Tool in Engineering Teams Over the past several years, I have worked closely with engineering teams to determine how AI can be used reliably and consistently in the development process. While AI can be leveraged across multiple stages of coding, one of the best starting points is improving code cove...