Continuous Integration Nirvana: Tricks to Reach Heavenly Automation

Any amount of automation is worth it, as long as it is effective. From simple things like manipulating pull request labels and ticket statuses, or using your CI engine to build your changelogs, to strategic operations like removing obsolete Pantheon environments or ensuring you always pick the right database for your build, little chunks of automation can substantially improve your workflow.

Complex web development projects usually require spending considerable amounts of time planning and implementing advanced features. That’s why it makes so much sense to design systems that automate your development process as much as possible, allowing you to focus on quality coding and site building.

In this presentation, I’ll share some experiences and tricks for automating many common tasks as part of your continuous integration workflow, making use of PHP scripts and Jenkins jobs as well as the APIs of popular services like Github, Jira, Slack, and CircleCI.

Although not strictly required, attendees walking into the session could use some basic familiarity with continuous integration and some of the tools described above. They should walk away having expanded their knowledge of the universe of possibilities that automation brings to the development workflow.