In 2014, PagerDuty struggled with safely releasing reliable mobile applications to users due to some issues with how the code was being packaged and handled.

PagerDuty’s mobile apps are hybrid and used Cordova to share code between platforms. Coding was straightforward but packaging was not, as a separated Gulp-based build process was also being used. The PagerDuty team took a page from Java and started creating software artifacts.

Rather than checking in transformed code or publishing modules to NPM, the team started creating zipped-up build artifacts, which coincided perfectly with GitHub's Releases feature which arrived in 2013. So despite JavaScript lacking a standard packaged app format like a JAR, PagerDuty was still able to improve the build times and sizes of their mobile apps.