Our team at The Ledger has long prided itself on a lean and efficient development process. However, as the project scaled, our CI build times began to creep up, sometimes taking over 20 minutes for a full build. This was impacting our ability to iterate quickly and maintain developer happiness.
Before making any changes, we committed to a thorough analysis. We integrated build time tracking into our pipeline and used detailed logs to identify the slowest steps. What we found was eye-opening.
The assumption that our tests were the main culprit turned out to be incorrect. In reality, the dependency installation and bundling phases were where most of the time was lost.
With clear data in hand, we focused on optimizing the actual bottlenecks. We introduced caching strategies, parallelized certain tasks, and cleaned up our dependency tree. The results were immediate and significant.
Today, our average build time sits at just under 10 minutes—a full 50% improvement—without any changes to our core technology stack. This experience reinforced the value of data over intuition in engineering decisions.