Paul Merlin
Gradle Build Tool Principal Software Engineer
Paul is an experienced, self-made, software engineer with a wide knowledge ranging from computers, network security and architectures to high-level programming langages, domain modeling and cryptography. 45 years old, hobbyist at 7 already, Paul professionally started to build softwares in 2000.
He joined the Gradle team height years ago, on time for 2.14, participated to the big performance efforts that went into the 3.x and 4.x versions, lead the Gradle Kotlin DSL and Configuration Cache teams since then and is now working on making Gradle more declarative.
Developer-first Gradle builds
In the ever-evolving landscape of software development, the efficiency of build systems plays a pivotal role in project success. Part of our vision for Gradle is to deliver an elegant and extensible declarative build language that allows developers to describe any kind of software in a clear and understandable way. Our current effort is described in https://blog.gradle.org/declarative-gradle.
This session delves into the challenges faced by developers when understanding and maintaining complex build scripts and demonstrates an innovative approach that harnesses the expressiveness of Kotlin while imposing restrictions to enhance clarity and maintainability. Attendees will gain insights into the rationale behind adopting a declarative paradigm for build definition and the benefits it brings to project workflows.
Key topics covered include:
Declarative Build Principles: Understand the advantages of a declarative build language and its impact on project maintainability, readability, and collaboration.
Expressive DSL: Explore the capabilities of the DSL and how it serves as a powerful tool for expressing build configuration concisely.
Impact on projects: Explore case studies of projects that use a declarative build language, showcasing improvements in build performance, understanding, and maintenance.
By attending this session, software developers and build engineers will leave with practical insights and knowledge about crafting a more maintainable, expressive, and declarative Gradle build definition.