One of the main engineering backbones here are ClassDojo is our CI/CD pipeline. By having a pipeline that automates tests, migrations, rolling out to production, and so much more, we allow the engineering team to focus on building great products. No managing a release train or babysitting a deployment!

In this episode, I chat with Dom and Gregg about what CI/CD means to us, how we do it, and what steps you can take to start your own journey to continuous deployment.

As you might know, ClassDojo offers a paid subscription for parents, to give them extra tools for interacting with both their teachers and their kids. For several years, we built and supported a system for managing those subscriptions. That’s non-trival work: it involves integrations with several app stores and payment providers and wrangling different data models for each.

In the last year, we’ve switched to a third-party solution: RevenueCat. It’s not easy switching payment systems when you’ve got several years of data in the old system, and need to keep it running until the new integration is ready to go.

I recently sat down with Urjit and Sarah, two of the engineers who led this project, and asked them about the challenges they faced and the lessons they learned as they replaced the wheels of our bus without making a pit stop. You can listen to the conversation below:

Note: we're still in the process of setting up a podcast feed, so stay tuned for that!