React Native Chicago

• Nick Kaffine - From 45 Minutes to 7: Flexcar’s CI/CD Evolution

DESCRIPTION: At Flexcar, our CI/CD pipelines didn’t start out fast or smooth. Early on, we were stuck with a clunky release process built around long-lived release branches, and pipelines that took 30–45 minutes to complete. Iterating quickly was painful, and merging multiple changes in succession was nearly impossible. Over time, we rethought how our pipelines worked, moving to tag-based release builds, experimenting with merge trains, and eventually introducing optimizations like conditional native builds. Today, our typical pipelines complete in just 6-7 minutes for most changes, while still enforcing robust checks like linting, TypeScript compilation, and automated tests. This talk is a story of that journey: the challenges we faced, the tradeoffs we made, and the lessons learned that helped us make our pipelines both faster and more reliable.
BIO: Nick Kaffine is an Engineering Manager at Flexcar, where he leads the mobile engineering team. He started his career as a native iOS engineer and in 2023 led Flexcar’s migration from native to React Native, where the team has now been fully operating for two years.
Networking: 1hr (Post talks)
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