How One Engineer Slashed Build Times from 40 Minutes to 90 Seconds

In this episode of The Software Engineering Podcast, Lucas and Luna dive into the story of a senior engineer at a mid-size SaaS company who cut their CI build pipeline from 40 minutes to 90 seconds. They walk through the specific bottlenecks: a monolithic Gradle build with unnecessary task dependencies, Docker layers being rebuilt on every commit, and a test suite that ran sequentially. The fix was a combination of incremental compilation, parallel test execution, and a custom caching layer using BuildKit. They also discuss the cultural resistance to changing a 'working' build system and how the engineer used data to win buy-in. By the end, listeners get a concrete playbook for auditing their own CI pipelines and a reminder that build speed is often the cheapest performance optimization you can make. #SoftwareEngineering #BuildOptimization #CI #Gradle #Docker #BuildKit #IncrementalCompilation #ParallelTesting #DevEx #DeveloperProductivity #CacheStrategy #BuildPipeline #Tech #EngineeringBestPractices #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast #TheSoftwareEngineeringPodcast #Fexingo Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo