Hacker News Reader

Comment by nisten | Hacker News Reader

What's sad about this is that CircleCI actually has a great product and is one of the nicest ways to do end to end automation for mobile development/releases. Having their pipeline in place actually feels quite liberating.

The sad part is that they take this for granted and liberate all your data and security weaknesses too to unknown third parties for either a weird ideological reason about interoperability or a small marginal profit.

I don't understand why they can't do both(interoperability and security), their main profit is not data, it's customers paying for infrasctructure. They don't have to share any data at all and are fully capable of providing a competent level of security.

If anything I think if they cut out the profit line from sharing metrics etc with third parties it would actually bring more customers in because of increased confidence in the product.

View on HN

Ex-Circler here, I was there for the second half of 2018.

The product is the source of profit, not the data.

I was never asked to work on anything relating to sharing metrics for money, and didn't hear of any such product in my time there. That's not the business model.

In fact, some users the only thing they know is the VCS username, and only then because that user has pushed a commit that has triggered a build: the user data they have for most users is literally worthless to any other party.

I doubt they are getting paid to share any data at all. Usually, the point of 3rd party services is for improving the service or keeping it bug free and functional.

I would imagine they have some services that are logging JavaScript errors and probably some that are tracking how people use the service.

If you have a Freemium or tiered service especially, you have to understand how people use your service in order to convince them to pay or upgrade.

> you have to understand how people use your service

Thats why they need Facebook's tracking inside the admin part of the APP (on na paid account)?

Do you have any sources to back your claims that they sell your data? You repeat that all over your comment, but the crucial piece (the evidence) is lacking.

I ask this because as a Circle customer, if they are selling my data, I'll be out quick. But I see no indication they're doing anything of the sort.

Great product? Their backend, maybe, but their frontend is just a horrible piece of ux design/frontend junk.

What is bad about it? Having moved over from Travis recently, I find the UX far better.

Fanned out, or triggered builds, don' trace well. User api token env variable is wierd and docs are terrible on that point and others. Wanna see a list of projects? Go to "add project". You are required to "follow" projects in some cases. There is no search build feature. There is no real filter builds feature. The paging is terrible. No date search feature. No parameter search feature. If I go to circleci.com even thoigh I am logged in I see a big fat hero advert about how great circleci is and who their clients are. (Hey I'm your client ever thought about that?) Cant name your individual builds. Cant tag your individual builds. Build parameters even when fanned out dont show so 10-20 builds are indiscernible in a monorepo. I could really go on all day, this is not half of it. It just comes across as this big legacy software blob that have too many bad design decisions to revamp and will just go irrelevant through time and they instead of improving their product to gain new customers they just hold on and bleed their existing ones as long as they can. Suppose it makes financial sense though in their defense, their code must be in a total deadlock.

> their main profit is not data, it's customers paying for infrasctructure. They don't have to share any data at all

But the goal is explosive growth, not profit, hence marketing tools. Ask their VC.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com