Last Wednesday we had Brighton Java’s March event. It was another good turn-out, with about 35 people turning up to hear Jose Baena talk about his experience of continuous delivery.
Hearing about other people’s experiences with introducing a technology is incredibly valuable. The talk was followed by a discussion, chaired by James Stanier. We’ve not often used this format but it drew out some interesting discussion points.
Jose’s presentation was great (especially the hypnotic footage of an apple-slicing machine), with some useful suggestions on how to get Maven, Nexus, Ansible and Jenkins working together – with Jenkins acting as the driving force. There was also a detailed explanation of the importance of versioning.
The discussion underlined something I’ve been thinking about for a while – that things like continuous delivery need to be put in place early on, that these sort of infrastructural things are hard to retrofit. But that’s a story for another post.
Dan Chalmers has also posted a response to the meet-up: Continuous Deployment and Developers on-call. Dan does a good job of explaining the issues around making developers responsible for their code. I still think this is important but making it work in practise is a subtle, difficult problem.