
Jon Block discusses the importance of merge queues and shares best practices for scaling build and deploy processes in engineering organizations.
“Engineers don’t always like merge queue because they have to wait longer for their PRs to merge. But the trade-off is that the quality of those merges will be higher, and the company will have less downtime and outages,” says Jon Block, founder of LowRouchAdvisor. Using a merge queue is like wearing a seatbelt, he adds, the only responsible thing to do for large engineering organizations that ship products that matter. Jon also shares best practices and lessons learned about scaling build and deploy from his 26 years of experience. Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Developer Experience and Scaling Repositories 01:37 Managing Repositories in Large Organizations 05:24 Monorepo vs. Multirepo: Pros and Cons 07:53 Challenges of Merge Queues and Deployment at Scale 13:02 GitHub Merge Queue Limitations and Solutions 15:36 Batching, Stability, and Deployment Strategies 19:16 Train Method of Deployment and Rollbacks 22:37 Build Systems, Bazel, and Build Avoidance 23:20 Impact of Flaky Tests and Automation 28:46 Adopting Merge Queues and Cultural Challenges 34:11 AI in Development: Opportunities and Risks 37:41 Closing Remarks and Resources About Jon Block Jon Block has spent 26 years in…
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