Gradle with Hans Dockter

Developer Productivity Engineering

This month we welcomed a very special guest speaker. Hans Dockter, Gradle CEO, gave an oustanding presentation and demonstration on Developer Productivity Engineering. Hans described the importance of creating a valuable “conversation with your toolchain” and the impacts of uneffective conversations. In our industry, where large teams develop large complex systems, this conversation is particularly important. Not only can optimization of your toolchain improve the quality of your product and your ability to deliver quickly, it also has a surprisingly large impact on your costs. Hans described a case where Gradle was working with a team of 100 engineers where reducing build times by 4 minutes saves over 50,000 engineering hours per year. To put that in context, within our domain this represents millions of dollars in contract cost per year! Just imagine what you could do if you translated that unproductive wait time to productive development time for your mission.

Thanks to Hans for giving our community such a great opportunity to interact with a leader in the Agile / DevOps domain. And thanks to everyone from our community who provided feedback this month. Everyone was really impressed with the concepts of Developer Productivity Engineering and the real world demonstrations Hans provided from within Gradle’s own live environment. In fact some described this as the best meetup we’ve had to date. One of you said, “I’ve been an Agile / DevOps evangalist in my company for almost a decade and Hans really opened my eyes to some powerful new concepts and solutions.” If you weren’t able to join us this month, I really encourage you to watch the presentation recording below.

If you’re not familiar with Gradle, I’d highly encourage you to try it out. In fact, if you’ve seen the demos we’ve created for the meetup, you’ve seen Gradle in action already. Gradle provides 2 products you should check out. The Gradle build tool is a powerful, flexible, open source solution to automate and accelerate your pipeline. Reguardless of the CI/CD orchestration you use (e.g. Jenkins), I highly recommend you delegate pipeline step implementaiton to a high quality build tool like Gradle, so that you have repeatable execution across you CI/CD and developer desktop. The other product, Gradle Enterprise, is a build telemetry, analysis, and automation solution used to measure, assess, and optimize the conversation you and your team have with your toolchain. Gradle Enterprise works with multiple build tools such as Gradle and Maven with more support coming in the near future.

I’d also like to highlight the Developer Productivity Engineering book Gradle has pre-published for free. Check it out!

For more info check out the following:

• Gradle Build Tool - https://gradle.org/
• Gradle Enterprise - https://gradle.com/

Support the DevOps for Defene Meetup

We have setup GitHub Sponsors for our meetup. If you get value from what we do in the community, please consider supporting us at any level you are comfortable with. Our sponsor, TEK Systems, has been extremely generous in their support and our organizers continue to contribute both financially and by volunteering their time. GitHub Sponsors provides a simple way for your to provide your support as well with the benefit of matching funds from GitHub and their parent company Microsoft. Everything we do for DevOps for Defense is 100% open source and volunteer based. If you’d like to volunteer to help organize or present a topic to our community please contact us at devopsfordefense@gmail.com. Consider helping us continue to grow and bring new events to our community.

Attribution

Images by JD Black.