Apologies for the silence…..

For developers and QA alike, getting version 1.0 out of the door was a lot of hard work. I doubt my experience in this is very different from anyone involved in the majority of commercial projects as you push to get something concrete, and most importantly saleable out into the market place.

For all the talk and effort through beta and release candidate releases to make it just another release, the emotional and mental effort has left me still exhausted nearly two weeks later. Of course being a father to 2 young boys doesn’t help with the exhaustion, but it sure helps to forget about work when I leave the office.

So was it a marathon or a series of sprints? Well in reality I guess it really was was both. Each sprint built to a peak, but with an ‘immovable’ release date, the pace and pressure built to a crescendo that left me feeling like a triathlete collapsing across the line.

Like a fool I also volunteered to showcase our latest work in an online global company meeting. So in reality it was another week later before I got a chance to stop and take stock of what we (and I myself) have achieved, and where we go from here.

Of course as we move into the next phase of the software development life cycle (SDLC) there is no rest for the wicked. Providing support for sales and customers will provide new challenges as well as continuing the task of building out automated test coverage for current code and new developments. Add in the never ending task of pushing the quality agenda throughout the whole team and shifting left with testing means that I will not be running out of things to do any time soon.

So moving on with this…..

Its not that I haven’t made an effort to make progress over the last couple of weeks.

• I tried and failed spectacularly to get Opera support in my grid.
• I have been looking at getting some static testing into the project starting with a code style. Getting a CheckStyle configuration working in Gradle and Intellij IDEA is easy. Getting to grips with the options available to make my own CheckStyle configuration, not so much. Still, as this is a tutorial more for myself than anyone else, so expect me to be back onto this one soon.
• I have to get my head back into dependency injection and implementing logging.
• I also attended the online Introduction to Gradle Training course last week. Apart from the very unsociable hours for a European (Training online from 4:30-8:30 pm is no fun with a young family!) I would thoroughly recommend this to anyone building using Gradle. Expect more on this is the coming weeks.

Progress made:

• Nothing to report.

Lessons learnt:

• Reaching General Availability is exhausting, but very satisfying.
• I like Gradle more, the more I learn about it.
• Junit5’s junit-platform-gradle-plugin is a pain – I can’t wait for native support.
• I need to get back the discipline to find some proper time (and mental energy) to progress through the next few steps.

See you next week with something to report I hope.