At JDriven our mission is to improve the quality of software engineering. This is a great and noble cause and also something that cannot be achieved in isolation. I believe this is something that the entire community should be aiming for and can be achieved with the right mindset.

But how can you stimulate and create this state of mind and environment where quality and productivity go hand in hand? First let me start by saying this is my point of view and by no means a silver bullet. Just read and take what you think is useful and leave out what’s not.

Great to be the one kicking off our yearly blog festival Blogtober! This first blog is not particularly technical, but this subject has been the most prominent thing on my mind during the last 6 months. Connection with colleagues and sharing knowledge is part of our DNA at JDriven, better yet, it is part of our vision as a company. Throughout the years we gathered lots of experience in how we share our knowledge with the community. But this was always in a world without social distancing and other connection limitations.

Nowadays we see more and more intelligence added to our applications. This can be in any form but mostly we see it in the form of predictions or some form of recognition. This added value comes at a price and requires a new way of working within our established Software Engineering practice.

Infrastructure automation basically is the process of scripting environments — from installing an OS to installing and configuring servers on instances. It also includes configuring how the instances and software communicate with one another, and much more. Automation allows you to redeploy your infrastructure or rebuild it from scratch, because you have a repeatable documented process. It also allows you to scale the same configuration to a single node or to thousands of nodes. In the past years, several open source and commercial tools have emerged to support infrastructure automation. These tools include Ansible, Chef, Terraform and Puppet. They support cloud platforms, but also virtual and physical environments. On Google Cloud Platform you have the possibility to use Cloud Deployment Manager. The Cloud Deployment Manager allows you to automate the configuration and deployment of your Google Cloud with parallel, repeatable deployments and template-driven configurations.

Op de eerste volledige conferentie dag van JavaOne stond natuurlijk meteen de keynote gepland. Het eerste gedeelte van de keynote werd verzorgd door de hoofdsponsor Intel en was best vermakelijk al lag de salespitch er wel dik bovenop. Intel lanceerde 2 opensource producten voor de Java community: