Posts

During my work on Maven today, I found a very specific bug. The error message wasn’t that clear, and I couldn’t make a guess what might’ve caused it. I read about git bisect a few times and figured that today, I would use that tool to find the bug.

Recently, the Maven community decided to push forward and start working towards a 4.0.0 release. The first question after this announcement is of course: what can we expect Maven 4 to bring us? A lot - and in this post, we want to highlight some of the features that we are particularly excited about.

When you operate servers, whether physical or virtual, at some point in time you may find yourself victim to bots or botnets trying to access your server over SSH. Even if you configure your server to not expose SSH on port 22 (the default), chances are you will be a target at some point. This is especially true if your server is hosted in a public cloud, since these typically reserve ranges or blocks of IP addresses. Apart from making it as hard as possible to scan your server, you can also serve the community and report those attacks.

Everything is code, and code is everywhere. For me, this means I put more and more stuff into version control. Whether it is infrastructure descriptions, documentation, software or this blog, I always store it in a Git repository. But sometimes this gets dirty, because you accidentally forget to change your Git user details.

Over the years, badges have become a way for open source maintainers to show the state of their product. Badges can give a quick overview of the code quality, test coverage or build health of an open-source product. The problem with code coverage is, however, that a high coverage doesn’t mean the tests are any good. If only there was a way to show the quality of the test suite…

Setting up new infrastructure can be a tedious process. It doesn’t matter whether it is on-premise or in the cloud. Many organisations have a long process of filling forms, obtaining budget clearance, asking for priority and verifying everything is set up correctly. The cloud promises us to make things better, and at least it got a lot faster. But still, we can make many mistakes in this manual process, and if we want to duplicate a deliberately crafted setup things become even harder….

Together with four “AwesomeSauce” colleagues from Info Support, I’m attending DevNexus this year. For me, it’s the second time I’m here, as I spoke here in 2018, too. Next to delivering my own “React in 50 minutes” session I’m attending some sessions to update with new technology advancements. After a great first day, let’s move on to the second (and last) day.

Together with four “AwesomeSauce” colleagues from Info Support, I’m attending DevNexus this year. For me, it’s the second time I’m here, as I spoke here in 2018, too. Next to delivering my own “React in 50 minutes” session I’m attending some sessions to update with new technology advancements.

Shipping a new release of software usually involves quite a few steps. Depending on the type of software, this may be something you rarely do. Thus, it often involves manual steps. This is not necessary! Maven has had its “Release Plugin” since approximately April 2007; yes, that’s over 12 years! It has served both the Maven project and many other software projects.

This year I’m returning to Devoxx. I’m planning to write some notes on interesting sessions or other content. Also, I’ll be delivering my talk on Transport Layer Security tomorrow. But today was a day of catching up with old friends and attending a talk or two.

One talk really caught my attention: “Implementing a simple JVM in Rust”.