Since the beginning of my career as a Java developer, keeping up to date with Java was fairly straightforward. Big releases came every few years, causing a bit of mayhem in tooling, IDEs and job interview questions. However with each release there was a lot of time to adjust and migrate to newer versions. With Java 9 things have changed. The so called new release cadence was announced by Oracle. Instead of releasing a new major version each few years, we will get one every half year. This poses a lot of challenges to companies using Java in production, developers and the community as a whole.

Switching from monolith to microservices requires a very solid technical ecosystem. One of the most crucial subsystems is monitoring. But for monitoring to work, you need data to monitor. At Allegro, we decided to use Graphite as metrics storage and to build our monitoring ecosystem around tools that integrate with it.

Devoxx (formerly JavaPolis) is an annual Java-centric conference organized by BeJUG that takes place in Antwerp, Belgium. Such a big Java event can‘t go unnoticed by Allegro. This year five representatives of our company had a chance to experience five full days of Devoxx.

In the good old days of Maven releasing projects was straightforward. Everyone knew and used maven-release-plugin, a plugin that behind simple facade did huge amounts of work. In Gradle times things started to get complicated. In exchange for greater flexibility we gave up good old, maybe a bit rusty tools that were part of our developer kits for years. Now we try to find new ones. Most of teams in Allegro have decided to migrate their projects from Maven to Gradle and we, too, are searching for perfect tools to do our job (and builds).