Build engineering at Apple and the future of deploy previews
Earlier this week, Netlify announced it had acquired a startup called FeaturePeek. Combining the two companies will allow Netlify to build out the next generation of collaborative Deploy Previews. We are joined by Eric Silverman, a co-founder at Featurepeek, now a senior engineer at Netlify, and Cassidy Williams, friend of the show and principle developer experience engineer at Netlify.
Eric was a build engineer at Apple for many years, then started a FeaturePeek which went through Y-combinator. He talks about what he learned from those experiences and how he'll be applying that knowledge to his new job at Netlify.
The teams combined forces to make the process of submitting and gathering feedback on deploy previews easier and more broadly accessible outside technical teams. As Cassidy explained:
“Based on technology from FeaturePeek, Deploy Previews enables reviewers to comment, screen record, and annotate right from the actual preview link. No new tabs. No new tools. Everyone’s feedback is recorded back in the GitHub pull request and can even extend to popular productivity tools such as Clubhouse.io, Linear, and Trello.”
This feature set is near and dear to Ben’s heart. Now folks from marketing and design can offer feedback and be more tightly involved in the development process for new features, products, and websites. All without really learning Git!
Also discussed this episode: weirdware, workflow automation, Jerry Garcia, compound bows, and the spread of Git and branch methodology to areas well outside software development.