Wherever you're going, TomTom will help you get there. The company's 2,000+ developers work with billions of data points from millions of sources to build maps and location technologies relied on by both consumers and enterprises in everything from shipping and logistics to self-driving vehicles.

Founded in 1991, TomTom’s development landscape became sprawling and fragmented over the years, as different teams adopted different tools. By 2022 the company relied on various source code repositories, CI/CD solutions, issue management tools, and artifact management systems, often leaving developers stuck managing tools instead of writing code. “We had Jenkins servers running all over the place,” says staff software engineer, Martin Migasiewicz. “In the cloud, in data centers, even under people’s desks.”

Fragmentation also meant developers had difficulty maintaining a flow state, because they constantly had to switch contexts while committing code, and new hires had to learn numerous tools and processes just to get started. “They had to jump between too many different tools,” Software Engineering Manager Semih Ural says.

For us, GitHub provides a full ecosystem of developer tooling that allows us to do our best, most focused work.

The company standardized on GitHub Enterprise Cloud in 2020 to reduce fragmentation and streamline and automate developer workflows to help them work more efficiently and with less toil. Since then, TomTom has migrated around 70% of their CI/CD workflows to GitHub Actions. "Defining a ‘golden path’ with GitHub’s platform was crucial. It meant that developer teams wouldn't need to maintain their own infrastructure and could instead focus on building product features," says Migasiewicz. “For us, GitHub provides a full ecosystem of developer tooling that allows us to do our best, most focused work.” 

GitHub Copilot has become an important part of that ecosystem. Already, it's become a must-have tool, as their developers use it for everything from writing boilerplate code to refactoring old code to writing documentation. Developer Experience Product Manager Silvia Longo says 85% of the company's engineers feel more productive when using GitHub Copilot, while 70% say it enables them to focus on more satisfying work. "GitHub Copilot is the most impactful productivity tool I’ve used," Longo says.

GitHub Copilot is the most impactful productivity tool I’ve used.

Meanwhile, TomTom is using GitHub Actions to maintain consistent, automated build and deploy processes, eliminating much of the context switching that had previously hindered their developers. GitHub Actions alone considerably reduced the company’s infrastructure spending, enabling the company to dedicate more resources to other strategic initiatives and build more innovative solutions for customers. 

GitHub Actions is also helping TomTom deliver code faster than ever. Prior to adopting Actions, queue times and build duration were major productivity blockers for developers at TomTom. By implementing the latest Actions Runner Controller, a Kubernetes operator that orchestrates and scales self-hosted runners for GitHub Actions, the company was able to cut their queue length in half. And TomTom’s average build time dropped by nearly 25%. 

Short queues and faster build times mean faster deployment and faster time to market. "Our developers are able to spend more time on code and less time waiting in line," Ural says. "The result is a more agile and responsive development process, giving us a competitive edge." TomTom engineers also spend less time building new automated processes thanks to the GitHub Marketplace and the wealth of reusable actions and workflows it provides.

With resources unified on the GitHub platform, TomTom developers spend less time managing tools and more time building tools to help customers find their way around. "Our mission is to build better experiences for our customers," Longo says. "We are confident that our development processes will reach new heights with GitHub."