Why do we build code?

Most developers are familiar with the process of building code. When we work in the field of DevOps, however, we might face issues that developers who specialize in programming a particular component type won't necessarily experience.

For the purposes of this book, we define software building as the process of molding code from one form to another. During this process, several things might happen:

• The compilation of source code to native code or virtual machine bytecode, depending on our production platform.
• Linting of the code: checking the code for errors and generating code quality measures by means of static code analysis. The term "Linting" originated with a program called Lint, which started shipping with early versions of the Unix operating system. The purpose of the program was to find bugs in programs that were syntactically correct, but contained suspicious code patterns that could be identified with a different process than compiling.
• Unit testing...