Lev Lazinskiy

Growing the CircleCI Community with Discourse

One of the things that I am most proud of so far in my tenure at CircleCI is our community site. It has been really exciting to watch this small community blossom over the last six months. We now have over 2000 users, and more people sign up each day. It is great to see all of the great ideas, knowledge sharing, hacks, and engagement from our users.

My secret plan all along was to create an “international testing error database” and it looks like that is slowly but surely coming true. Over 80% of our traffic comes from worldwide google searches, and I assume that most of them are googling errors from their testing framework.

The most amazing thing is that a lot of people that come to the site for help are not even CircleCI users. This is great because at the end of the day, in addition to be a place where our users can get help and learn, I really would love for it to be the place where anyone using any CI tool can come and discuss how to do better at testing, CI, and CD.

I blogged about how we actually listen to feature requests, and also about a new thing that we are trying this week where users get to vote on a feature and at the end of voting we guarantee that we will develop it. It’s a cool experiment, and I encourage everyone to go vote!

I could not be happier with Discourse. It has enabled us to build a real community, and I am excited to continue to watch it grow.