In this talk I want to tell you the story of how my best friend pulled me into working with a customer because he, the architect, needed “an adult person in the room” before scaling the team. I want to talk about how we built the back-end team of a Django system, added order, structure, and collaboration, where there was loose coordination between individuals spread out globally before.

Our mission: to introduce stability, structure, and “boring releases” to a Django-based project while releasing frequently. Because quite frankly, we’re too old for adrenaline-filled midnight deployments.

Small controlled releases, incremental improvements to development and test environments, and smooth automation that allows testing almost anything locally, in CI, or in test environments. Using Jenkins and Invoke (pyinvoke.org) we have setup multiple automated “full” test environments for acceptance testing and to reproduce hard-to-analyze bugs – and don’t get me started on how valuable having nightly, fresh, and PII cleaned production data ready at our fingertips is.

Releases every week, over and over again, wouldn’t be possible with loose coordination though, we have workflows that ensure we keep our house in order, from capturing requirements and making mock-ups, to how our project board, release logs, and release announcements work.This is a story and about how our team – distributed over three continents – built our way of working to go fast and to ship boring, predicable releases, every single week since 2021 – excluding holidays.