Hi all, I see that DevCycle is offering a voucher in the virtual kit, curious whether anyone is using this or a similar product? My inclination is that it’s likely not worth the distraction of adding complexity but I’d love to hear your experience. We’re currently using GitHub alone to manage our code.
Hey!
I’m super excited to see people interested in DevCycle (I’m a bit biased, I work there, and I also made it available in the KoP)!
I’ll definitely admit it seems quite complicated at first glance, but after using any sort of feature flagging/remote variable system for a while - you’ll never go back from how easy it makes your development lifecycle.
The best FRC parallel I can give is that DevCycle is similar to the concept of an autonomous chooser using network tables. Changing codepaths without redeploying/recompiling.
For use cases, we don’t expect teams to be using it on their Robot during the season due to the runtime/cloud nature of it; but rather we set it up to be more of a deployment tool to help with your team’s supporting applications/infrastructure (websites, scouting apps, etc).
The goal of the tool is to provide a way to push code to “production” more frequently, and in FRC’s case, enabling less experienced students to contribute too, while not worrying about breaking the styling of the website when they add a new button or content, or breaking the app flow for their scouting app. You can safely manage who sees what content, and what functionality is enabled for a given subset of users through DevCycle and have it update without recompiling/deploying.
We specifically give a full calendar year of credits to teams (expires 01/01/2025) so that they can work on their offseason projects too!
My goal is to write up some documentation that is more FRC specific throughout this year, but if you’re curious about what you can do with it; we have some Javascript based example implementations (DevCycle Labs · GitHub) as well as some pretty great docs around more general usage if you’re familiar with the concept of feature flagging already (DevCycle Example Apps | DevCycle Docs).
If you reach out to the FRC email (frc at devcycle.com) I’d be more than happy to help out!
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Hi Jamie, thanks for the response and explanation. We’ve not a team with bandwidth to build apps, so we’ll pass on it.