Gradle Inc. Announces New Advocacy Team to Foster Developer Productivity and Happiness

Inaugural members Trisha Gee, Baruch Sadogursky, and Brian Demers will focus on education and building community around Develocity and the practice of Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE)

July 11, 2023, San Francisco, CA. – Today, Gradle Inc. formally introduced its new Advocacy Team to accelerate its community building efforts around the adoption of DPE and Develocity, the leading software platform for enabling DPE. Specifically, the team will educate developers and technology leaders on solutions to key developer productivity and experience pain points, foster member connections and knowledge sharing, and gather input helpful in driving the evolution of Develocity and DPE. The new all-star team of advocates includes widely-followed industry veterans and thought leaders Trisha Gee, Baruch Sadogursky, and Brian Demers.

“Trisha, Baruch, and Brian bring invaluable expertise to Gradle, derived from years of leadership in the software development industry,” said Hans Dockter, CEO and Founder at Gradle. “At Gradle, striving for exceptional developer experience is at the heart of everything we do. We’re deeply committed to meeting the changing needs of the developer community and I’m thrilled to welcome such a respected team of advocates to advance those ongoing efforts.”

The team’s first members bring a wealth of valuable experience to Gradle. Notably:

Trisha Gee has first-hand experience and expertise in the software development industry, having spearheaded Java developer advocacy at JetBrains and worked extensively as a consultant and developer in financial markets in London. A Java Champion, she’s developed Java applications for industries of all sizes and contributed to industry books like Head First Java and 97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know. She is especially passionate about helping developers level up their careers and skills through actionable tips and tricks.

Baruch Sadogursky has years of expertise helping organizations empower their developer teams. He pioneered JFrog’s Developer Relations more than a decade ago and believes that great developer experience can be shaped through improved engineering processes and tools. Baruch has co-authored DevOps Tools for Java Developers and Liquid Software: How to Achieve Trusted Continuous Updates in the DevOps World to help developers better navigate the development space.

Brian Demers is a Java Champion and as a contributor to the Apache Maven project, he deepens our connections with the Maven community, which includes Develocity support for the popular build system. He has a deep-rooted passion for fast builds and automation that aim to enhance developers’ productivity and accelerate software delivery. Having previously served as a developer advocate at Okta, and contributed to the essential software security handbook, API Security, Brian brings valuable insights in security.

“When we set out to build this advocacy team, we sought individuals with extensive, first-hand experience as developers themselves.” said Justin Reock, Field CTO and Chief Evangelist at Gradle. “Their deep understanding of the challenges developers face on a daily basis will enable them to better communicate the value and urgency of Develocity and DPE, ultimately helping software development organizations gain a competitive edge.”

The formation of this advocacy team comes at a critical moment, as there’s an unmistakable and growing disconnect between IT leadership and developers. Recent surveys reveal the majority of developers are dissatisfied with the metrics leaders use to gauge their productivity. This disconnect not only fosters distrust between IT leaders and their developers, but also negatively impacts the speed and quality of an organization’s software delivery and ability to innovate. Gradle’s new advocacy team aims to proactively bridge that gap by creating awareness of developer inefficiencies, toil and frustrations and solutions that address them.

About Gradle
Gradle Inc. is the company behind the popular open-source Gradle Build Tool, which is downloaded over 30 million times a month, and the provider of the leading software solution for improving developer productivity and happiness called Develocity. Gradle is also pioneering the emerging practice of Developer Productivity Engineering. Elite development teams from companies like Airbnb, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Nasdaq, Netflix, SAP and ASML practice DPE to deliver quality software more rapidly at scale. They achieve this by leveraging Develocity’s innovative build and test performance acceleration technologies and analytics to proactively improve the reliability of the developer toolchain and make failure troubleshooting more efficient.