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Issue 79
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How I set up Helm’s CI/CD
Hey everyone! I hope you’ve all had a fantastic couple of weeks — welcome to another issue of the newsletter!
I am just back from Pragma Conference in Italy and wow was I blown away by how good an event they put on. The quality of the talks and speakers was incredibly high, the location was ideal, and I got to meet a bunch of awesome people from the community.
I want to use take this issue as an opportunity to thank Klaus Lanzarini and the rest of the Pragma team for doing such an amazing job with the conference, and for inviting me to such as special Pragma edition, I am honored ❤️.
I also wanted to quickly mention something else I have done this past two weeks, I have finally migrated Helm’s CI away from Xcode Cloud.
As I mentioned a few issues ago, I used a recent webinar to trial Namespace as a runner provider and I absolutely loved it, so I decided to go for it with Helm too.
And what a difference it made, from 15 minute runs in Xcode Cloud to 2 minutes using GitHub Actions + Namespace 🤯.
If you are still using Xcode Cloud and are struggling for slow builds, this is definitely a good combination to use. If you want a comprehensive list of alternatives, check out runs-on-mac.com, a resource by Pedro Piñera Buendia that I came across this week.
Now, let’s dive into today’s issue 👀…
🖥️ How this app saved $4000+ every month with self-hosted CI/CD Runners
I am a big fan of using Mac hardware providers like Namespace in conjunction with GitHub Actions to run my CI/CD workflows. However, this approach usually gets more expensive as your app scales.
Jeff Verkoeyen tells you all about it and why they decided to move to self-hosted runners. If you are convinced by Jeff Verkoeyen’s approach, you are in luck as the article also guides you through configuring your first self-hosted runner with GitHub Actions.
🚀 How to speed up your app’s builds
We often tend to think that the only way to speed up our CI/CD workflows is to pay for machines with more computing power. While that will definitely improve things, some times it is not necessary as the problem lies with inefficiencies in our app’s code compilation.
In this article, Antoine van der Lee goes through how you can visualize your build performance in Xcode and shares some tips on how you can reduce compilation times.
🤩 Improvements to review submissions in App Store Connect
Apple announced some exciting improvements to App Store Connect (and soon to Helm of course 😜).
The one I am most excited about allows us to submit extra content for review even if we already have an app version in review. Read Apple’s announcement to learn more!
📈 spmgraph: A CLI tool to Visualize your Swift Dependency Graph
As Felipe Marino announces in this post on LinkedIn, the GetYourGuide iOS team has recently open-sourced a CLI tool that allows you to visualize your app’s Swift Dependency Graph.
This tool unlocks a set of different functionality, keep reading this issue and you will see how generating a dependency graph can come in handy to speed up your CI/CD builds.
🎥 Speed up your CI/CD pipelines with Selective Testing
If you have a large codebase with extensive test coverage that takes a long time to run in CI/CD, you might be interested in this talk by Mike Gerasymenko at this year’s edition of Swift Connection.
The talk walks you through how to save time by running your tests selectively based on the changes you’ve made — in other words, testing only what has changed. This is especially useful for PR workflows 🚀