In this blog post I will describe how I went from roughly 150 build configuration, which were copy-pasted from each other, to all of them using a single template and only specifying the differences in each build configuration. TeamCity Kotlin DSL feature was used in order to simplify this normally unbelievably tedious task. The problem We run contract tests on TeamCity. With a big number of microservices, we [...]

When CloudFormation is used to create the infrastructure or application it is important to take a look at the artifacts that are generated and deployed. When it comes to artifacts and especially Java artifacts (jar or zip files) there are some important requirements that have to be followed. Otherwise, the deployment might take longer than required, or in cases where the CDK Pipeline is used to deploy the application the pipeline can go into an [...]

In december 2022 GitHub added the ability to share workflows between private repositories, opening the doors for Enterprises to make use of this feature. In this post I will describe how I implemented this in my APISMART Team and how I developed a system to verify changes to the reusable workflow. Basic knowledge of GitHub Actions is assumed. A working example can be found here: reusable-workflows-with-ci and reusable-workflows-sample-project Why reusable workflows I’ll [...]

Output variables can be powerful and frustrating at the same time. This simple how to, can save you ages of try and error. What are output variables Output variables are like return values of a step which can be used in all down streams like jobs, reusable workflows and more. See GitHub Workflow Job Output Example Accessing these outputs can be pretty challenging as it depends on the context in [...]

Europace started more than 20 years ago and is Germany’s biggest platform for real estate financing, housing-saving and credits with currently more than 35k of such transactions per month. With the success and therefore constantly adding new products and features using new technologies, Europace built up some technical debt as well as a zoo of technologies over the years. Running Europace on AWS Our way to an internal [...]

We recently migrated our session management from MongoDB to Redis. The migration itself was motivated by our experience with MongoDB, which didn’t handle high frequent updates and even more frequent reads particularly well. Redis on the other hand is known as a proven storage to handle exactly that use case. Database migrations aren’t always easy, because we need to learn new patterns, best practices, and quirks of another service. [...]

Wir haben vor einigen Jahren bei Europace bewusst begonnen, InnerSource best practices einzusetzen. Ziel dabei war es, team-übergreifende Zusammenarbeit zu vereinfachen, Silos abzubauen und trotz Abhängigkeiten zwischen Teams Entwicklung möglichst nicht blockierend zu gestalten. Vor allem in den vergangenen Monaten haben wir Erfahrungen sammeln können mit umfassenderem Einsatz von Lösungen aus dem InnerSource Bereich für vorhandene Herausforderungen. In diesem Blog Post wollen wir uns auf Learnings konzentrieren, die wir in diesem Prozess gewonnen haben: Wie starte ich ein neues [...]

Europace and other parts of our IT use a toolchain with GitHub, Jetbrains TeamCity, and Sonatype Nexus to implement CI/CD Pipelines. Developers have to be in the private network or connected to the VPN, if they want to access Maven and Gradle artifacts from our Nexus repository. Especially in times of COVID-19 more developers work from home, where connecting to the VPN becomes a necessity… does it? With our efforts to [...]

In unserer Angular Anwendung KreditSmart nutzen wir zum Testen Karma, Jasmine angereichert mit Chai und Sinon. In vielen Komponenten- und Service-Tests versuchen wir die Abhängigkeiten zu mocken bzw. zu stubben. Das kann schon mal einige extra Zeilen Quellcode mit sich bringen. Beim Zugriff auf die Stubs möchten wir zudem gerne Codevervollständigung seitens der IDE oder des Editors beim Zugriff und Typsicherheit haben. Der Stub soll die gleichen Methoden wie der gemockte Service haben. Als Rückgabewert sollen die Methoden jedoch Sinon-Stubs liefern. [...]

Some time ago, we published our experience running InnerSource projects in a series in this blog. We decided to bring the gist of that content back to the official collection of official patterns of the InnerSource Commons. With help from the upstream community the content was greatly improved: Provide standard base documentation … talking about which documentation in addition to the technical information should be present in InnerSource projects. Issue tracker use cases … talking about use cases for issue trackers, not only in InnerSource projects but [...]

It was right at the beginning of the Corona crisis in Europe - a day after Easter to be precise - that the InnerSource Summit EU was scheduled to take place in Madrid. Pretty early on we realized that it was unlikely that the summit would be like any other summit. So a decision as made, to move it to a virtual event. Long story very short: The event was very well attended, talks were [...]

So far we have covered collaboration through GitHub, mostly in issues and pull requests. In this article we will dig deeper into the other communication and collaboration tools that can be useful - and how to link them together. (German version below) Using Slack In our InnerSource initiative we’ve setup our channels in a way based on inspiration from the mailing list setup at The Apache Software Foundation: [...]

Simply saying thank you - something we often forget in the day to day flood of tasks, accountabilities and responsibilities. Today the Free Software Foundation Europe is celebrating the “I love free software day” to express gratitude to those who are underpinning a lot of today’s businesses by developing Free and Open Source Software. (German version below) Much as last year we would like to join the celebration and say thank [...]