Here are the top 5 Ideas & Insights and Expert Take articles from 2020 DPE Newsletters based on your engagement with the content (i.e. click throughs on embedded links). We thought you might find it interesting to see what your cohort of DPE newsletter readers found to be the most engaging headlines in 2020 in case you missed, or want to revisit, any of these popular topics.

1. Exploring the Developer Productivity Solution Landscape — Contrasts two primary approaches to DevProd
2. Build Engineers on the Rise — A look at compensation trends for build engineers and what it portends
3. Advice for Mitigating the Pandemic’s Impact on DevProd — Advice for team leaders from academic researchers
4. Comparing the Roles of Binary Repositories & Build Caches — Clarifies the objectives and benefits of each tool
5. Is it Time to Establish a Dedicated DPE Team? — Makes the case for building a dedicated DPE team

Working from home means more distractions and interruptions. With family at home demanding your attention, maintaining your creative flow is a real challenge. DPE can’t keep your kids from making surprise appearances during your Zoom calls or your spouse from asking you to run an urgent errand, but it can mitigate some of the impact on your productivity.

What if there was so little idle time waiting for builds and tests to complete that you are less prone to being side-tracked by the added distractions that come with working from home? Technologies like Build Cache and Distributed Testing make build and test feedback cycles fast and keep you more focused on writing code. Five-minute Gradle builds can be cut in half and 10-minute Maven builds & tests can be reduced to less than a minute.

Learn more about the impact of faster feedback cycles on not only individual developer productivity but also on team efficiency and the quality of shipped code.

This newsletter is dedicated to sharing information helpful in establishing and maturing developer productivity engineering best practices and technologies within your organization. But what would it be like to work with many leading-edge development organizations to address their DPE challenges and help launch and build out their DPE practices?

I shared some of my thoughts on this in a recent talk I did at droidcon Americas 2020 called Perspectives from a Gradle Solutions Engineer. I discussed what a Gradle Solutions Engineer actually does and what can be learned and shared from the perspective of somebody who has seen many, many Gradle builds.

The starting point and key to success in working with clients is buy-in to the importance of developer productivity, achieving faster feedback cycles, and using data to improve toolchain reliability. When teams I work with share this passion, it’s amazing what can be achieved and that makes my job a lot of fun and very rewarding. If this type of work sounds intriguing, it may be interesting for you to know that Gradle is currently looking to expand its solution engineering team.

At the recent droidcon Americas 2020 a panel of some of the world’s most knowledgeable and experienced Android build and test experts discussed best practices and lessons learned while scaling up Android builds for some of the best known applications. The panelists included Israel Ferrer Camacho (Dropbox), Ivan Gavrilovic (Google), Chiu-Ki Chan (mobile dev company principal and author), John Rodriguez (Square), Nelson Osacky (Gradle), and was moderated by Zac Sweers (Slack).

Check out this Q&A discussion if you are interested in hearing answers to questions related to dealing with large builds, determining optimal module size and how best to modularize, scaling testing, optimizing caching, flaky test management strategies, and some general tips and easy wins for your builds.

On November 19, you can learn how to cut your Gradle build and test times in half leveraging acceleration technology available in Gradle Enterprise. Topics include Build Cache basics, architecture considerations, task requirements, and best practices for using Gradle Enterprise to manage, analyze, and troubleshoot your Build Cache.

This is a 3-hour training session followed by a 30-minute Q&A. This course assumes a good understanding of the Java language and working knowledge of the Gradle Build Tool.

After this training participants will be able to:

• Understand the benefits of using the Gradle Build Cache
• Use and configure the Build Cache
• Optimize build logic for maximum cacheability
• Maximize the benefits of the Build Cache with Gradle Enterprise

• December 17, 9:00 am PT (2.5 hours): Hands-on Workshop: Gradle Build Cache Deep Dive
• January 12, 9:00 am PT (2.5 hours): Hands-On Workshop: Introduction to Developer Productivity Engineering
• January 21, 9:00 am PT (2.5 hours): Hands-on Workshop: Maven Build Cache Deep Dive
• January 25-26, 8:30 am - 12:30 PT (8.0 hours): Introduction Gradle
• February 17, 9:00 am PT (2.5 hours): Hands-on Workshop: Gradle Build Cache Deep Dive

Until next time!

- The Gradle Team