As another eventful year at Gradle draws to a close, the team behind Develocity is reflecting on the biggest changes and the greatest wins of 2023. Some things look different going into the new year—not least of all our new product name!—but our commitment to being the leading platform for improving developer productivity at scale remains unchanged. In case you missed some of the more noteworthy milestones, read on for a recap of this year’s most exciting developments.
We evolved our product
Gradle acquired Triplequote to boost productivity for Scala teams
Swiss-based software development technology provider Triplequote joined the Gradle team in February. With this acquisition, we extended our developer productivity solution portfolio directly to the Scala developer community by speeding up builds with the world’s only parallel compiler for the Scala language, Hydra, and paved the way for Develocity to support sbt, the most popular build system for Scala applications.
We added support for Bazel and sbt/Scala
In July we expanded the footprint of supported build systems as part of our strategy to provide a common productivity platform across all build and language ecosystems. Specifically, for Bazel, we began offering general availability support for core Develocity capabilities, including Build Scan®, Build Cache, and Build Failure Analytics. For sbt, we began offering a beta version of Develocity Build Scan.
We improved our readiness for large-scale mission-critical deployment environments
This year we improved Develocity performance scalability, high availability and reliability, and security. For security specifically, we achieved SOC2 (Type 1) compliance and earned Iron Bank certification to provide services to the Department of Defense. This paves the way for Develocity to provide its software build observability and traceability technology not just to the DoD but also to other highly-regulated industries such as financial services, in addition to the broader public sector.
Gradle Enterprise became Develocity
In September, we announced the rebranding of Gradle Enterprise to Develocity. Our CEO Hans Dockter explained, “We chose the name Develocity because it tells you unambiguously who this product is for and what business value we deliver. Developers experience the productivity benefits directly, while organizations experience accelerated time to software delivery and business impact.” With our rebrand, we overcame the common misconception that Gradle Enterprise was just for the Gradle Build Tool and underscored our commitment to multi-build system support.
We forged new partnerships
Gradle joined the Kotlin Foundation
In April, Gradle Inc. became the first new member of the Kotlin Foundation since its founding by Google and JetBrains in 2017. Our history of collaborating with JetBrains on Kotlin development dates back to 2015 when together we embarked on a plan to bring a Kotlin-based approach to writing Gradle build scripts and plugins, called Kotlin DSL. Now as a Silver Member, our goal is to accelerate the development of the Kotlin ecosystem and promote the use of Kotlin as a tool for education and industry.
The Bazel Products Partner program added Gradle as a member
Gradle Inc. joined the Bazel Products Partner program in July. Google admitted Gradle to the program as an organization that builds open-source or paid tooling that interfaces with Bazel and aims to improve the Bazel end-user experience and accelerate developer productivity.
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) welcomed Gradle as a Targeted Platinum Sponsor
In September, the ASF standardized on Develocity to deliver improved developer productivity and experience benefits. We entered into a collaboration with the Foundation as a Targeted Platinum Sponsor—we provide a free instance of Develocity that runs as a shared ASF infrastructure service available to all Apache projects and contributors. With this partnership, we’ve scaled DPE benefits such as build and test performance acceleration and more efficient troubleshooting across the ASF community of 320 active open-source software projects.
We won awards
The SIIA named Gradle the Most Innovative Tech Company of 2023
In June, Gradle Inc. was named the Most Innovative Tech Company of 2023 as part of the 38th annual Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) CODiE Awards. We earned this award thanks to Develocity’s innovative technologies, including its performance acceleration and failure analytics capabilities. The esteemed CODiE Awards program honors the best software companies and products for their outstanding track records of innovation and ability to achieve their visions.
The Software Report included Hans Dockter in its list of The Top 50 SaaS CEOs of 2023
The Software Report released its list in October, a list which included Gradle founder and CEO Hans Dockter. Leaders who made the list were described as both strategic and tactical in execution, visionaries capable of inspiring thousands of people and mobilizing their teams day in and day out. Hans was recognized as the creator of Gradle Build Tool, Gradle’s open-source build system, and Develocity, the first DPE solution platform.
Gradle won the InfoWorld Technology of the Year Award
The InfoWorld Technology of the Year Awards recognize the best and most innovative products in software development, cloud computing, data analytics, and machine learning. After making the list of finalists in November, we proudly took home the award for software development in December for innovation in our “data-driven approach and how it connects to dev tools to identify causes of issues.”
We pioneered the practice of Developer Productivity Engineering
DPE Lowdowns featured Spotify, LinkedIn, JetBrains, and Apollo
Hosted by the Gradle team, DPE Lowdowns feature engineering leaders sharing how DPE practices and tools delivered meaningful productivity wins for their development teams. This year featured guests from LinkedIn, JetBrains, Spotify, and Apollo. Although these events took place live, it’s never too late to get the lowdown.
DPE Forums in Seattle and New York attracted top tech and business leaders
This year we hosted DPE Forums in Seattle (July) and New York (October), bringing together local engineering leaders from each metro to discuss the latest DPE perspectives and practices along with organization-specific success stories and lessons learned. Speakers included software leaders from GitLab, Meta, Microsoft, Netflix, and Nasdaq. This more intimate event format promoted in-depth discussion and helped further DPE advocacy efforts for attendees.
We hosted a sold-out DPE Summit
The only event dedicated to the practice of Developer Productivity Engineering and Developer Experience returned to San Francisco in September with a sold-out house of over 500 attendees. In its second year, the event welcomed leading DPE practitioners from some of the most innovative engineering organizations, including Airbnb, LinkedIn, Meta, Netflix, Slack, Spotify, and Uber. Session recordings can be found at DPESummit.com.
We made an impact
We improved the experience of thousands of developers
Users of our free Build Scan® service ran a total of 26 million scans to get granular analytic information for their builds. Put another way, a free Build Scan was run approximately every 1.2 seconds this year, empowering many thousands of users to fix problems more quickly, debug performance issues, and share deep links to specific report elements for more efficient and effective collaboration.
As this year ends, we look forward to the next
As the team behind Develocity closes out 2023, we’re looking ahead to great things in 2024 and beyond. Our strategic focus areas include new training pathways for customers, more supported build tools, more CI integrations, more ML-driven insights, more powerful analytics and tool integration, as well significant progress towards “zero touch” deployments.
If you have ideas for how Gradle can increase your developer velocity (Develocity!), send us a note here.
And with that, we wish you a very happy new year!