Build, Deploy, and Merge Queues at Scale with Jon Block

“Engineers don’t always like merge queue because they have to wait longer for their PRs to merge. But the trade-off is that the quality of those merges will be higher, and the company will have less downtime and outages,” says Jon Block, founder of LowRouchAdvisor. Using a merge queue is like wearing a seatbelt, he adds, the only responsible thing to do for large engineering organizations that ship products that matter.Jon also shares best practices and lessons learned about scaling build and deploy from his 26 years of experience. Chapters00:00 Introduction to Developer Experience and Scaling Repositories01:37 Managing Repositories in Large Organizations05:24 Monorepo vs. Multirepo: Pros and Cons07:53 Challenges of Merge Queues and Deployment at Scale13:02 GitHub Merge Queue Limitations and Solutions15:36 Batching, Stability, and Deployment Strategies19:16 Train Method of Deployment and Rollbacks22:37 Build Systems, Bazel, and Build Avoidance23:20 Impact of Flaky Tests and Automation28:46 Adopting Merge Queues and Cultural Challenges34:11 AI in Development: Opportunities and Risks37:41 Closing Remarks and ResourcesAbout Jon BlockJon Block has spent 26 years in software engineering, nearly all of it at high-growth startups. He has served as VP of Engineering and CTO multiple times and today advises engineering organizations through his firm, Low Touch Advisors.About Hangar DX (https://dx.community/)The Hangar is a community of senior DevOps and senior software engineers focused on developer experience. This is a space where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas, share hard-earned wisdom, troubleshoot issues, and ultimately help each other in their projects and careers.We invite developers who work in DX and platform teams at their respective companies or who are interested in developer productivity.Verify AI CodeAI writes code faster than humans can review it. Aviator Verify provides compliance-grade verification through spec-driven development. Ship faster with complete audit trails. https://verify.aviator.co/