Transforming Software Shipping Through CI/CD

Problem

When I joined Qwilr, the build pipeline had been abandoned. There was a simple Bitbucket pipeline with some tests, but it wasn’t being run. Engineers had no reliable way to validate their code before it hit production, and deployments were manual and infrequent.

Action

Over five years, I evolved the pipeline incrementally — never a big-bang rewrite, always practical next steps. I introduced Docker for reproducible builds, migrated to Buildkite for flexible orchestration, and integrated comprehensive test suites with Cypress and Jest. Deployments were automated through AWS, triggered by pull request merges.

Outcome

The team went from no CI to shipping to production multiple times per day. Engineers could focus on their work with confidence that code would be validated and deployed safely. Shipping became the default, not an event — and that changed the pace of the entire engineering organisation.