Who Broke the Build?!

(circa 2015) This project is an old one and quite simple by today’s standards. It was one of my first applications of a home hobby to a problem at work.

Between the era when we requested a build and when our CI/CD pipeline automatically did builds at scheduled times for us during the workday, we lived with a period of overnight builds on the previous day’s code submissions. Developers found an email in their inbox the next morning to provide the status of the build. In the haystack of emails, the build status often got overlooked. We could go days with a broken nightly build. To get developers to make the build status a priority each morning, I installed a beacon-of-shame above my cubicle.

A build engineer added a single command to a Bash script to send a UDP packet to an IP address if the build failed. At that IP address was a relay and Ethernet shield stacked above an Arduino Uno. With the right command, the Uno closed a relay to activate the light. The beacon flashed until a developer informed me that the build was fixed. Only then did I send a UDP packet to open the relay again and turn off the light.

I credit the annoying nature of this visual indication of a build failure as the impetus to spur the build on code submission. Thereafter, only a successful build allowed a merge of the change package into the code repository.