Fast Builds, Secure Builds: Choose Two
Stripe engineer Sushain Cherivirala recently examined a familiar tension in software development: the tradeoff between build speed and build security. Writing for the company's engineering blog, Cherivirala, who works on Developer Productivity, framed the issue as a practical constraint that teams must navigate rather than eliminate.
The post, dated May 4, 2022, and tagged under Developer Productivity, Infrastructure, and Engineering, highlights how the push for faster build times can collide with the need for secure supply chains. While the article's title suggests an inherent dilemma — that teams can optimize for speed or security, but rarely both simultaneously — the content points to Stripe's broader engineering efforts as context.
Cherivirala points to related initiatives at the company, including how Stripe builds interactive docs with Markdoc, a system designed to deliver a strong user experience without compromising the authoring experience. The piece also references Stripe's selective test execution system, which the company says enables fast CI for its 50-million-line Ruby monorepo by employing "clever tricks" to run only the tests that matter as the team and codebase scale.
The subtext is clear: as monorepos grow and developer velocity becomes a metric, the infrastructure decisions made to keep builds quick carry security implications that cannot be ignored.
