Flowdock Guest Post

How MaestroDev Delivers Enterprise-Grade DevOps Orchestration Tools With Flowdock:

The MaestroDev product development team is globally distributed, covering 4 different timezones. Our Flow is active 24 hours a day with development information and tagged updates for each other. Whether they work face to face, or remotely, Flowdock puts all of our team members on an equal footing, catching up on important discussions as they start their day, and leaving notes about progress for team members whom they may not otherwise be able to meet with immediately.

Over at the Flowdock blog, I’ve written a guest post about how MaestroDev uses Flowdock, how we’ve integrated Flowdock into Maestro, and a few notes about how we “eat our own dog food” to deliver Maestro.

Interview with Emmanuel Venisse of Apache Maven and Continuum

I recently decided to catch up with Emmanuel and conduct an interview with him about his involvement in Maven since the early days, and his work at DevZuz.

I’ve had the pleasure of not only working with Emmanuel, but meeting him a few times face to face, including in his home town near Paris, France. Yes – I do consider it a privilege to actually meet the people I work with face to face!

It was great to talk to Emmanuel about all the things he has done for Maven and the things that still excite him.

The interview has been posted on the new devzuz.org site, which we launched today. If you are looking for information on Maestro, the Apache Maven community, Q for Eclipse or Eclipse Kepler you might like to check it out regularly.

Announcing DevZuz

I’m back from a holiday and am at ApacheCon, and obviously starting to get a few questions about what’s going on with Mergere.

After some months of planning, this week the new brand for our company was announced. DevZuz is the evolution of Simula Labs, including Mergere which is now a subsidiary.

Other than “What does DevZuz mean?”, the main question I am getting is “Why change the name?”

The reality of the two companies today is that they have a single, simple and clear goal: to help enterprises adopt open source projects and development processes. Unifying under a single brand gives us the opportunity for a “fresh start” that reflects that specific focus. Far from being the end of Mergere, we are continuing to do what we are doing well now, but additionally making some very positive changes (particularly in relation to our community involvement).

As DevZuz, we will expand on our development and support for Maestro, which is an enterprise-ready distribution of Maven technologies now coming up on its one-year anniversary. Maestro, which remains a free download, provides the foundation that is used behind the firewall to enable artifact-based development practices (and consume open source technologies). We will continue to provide support, training and consulting services for Maestro customers.

In addition, DevZuz can now provide hosted services that build on top of Maestro to help enterprises manage their open source governance and support.

We are also expanding our network of partners to provide additional services, and to continue to provide commercial support for key open source technologies.

More information can be found at our brand new web site. There you’ll also find that we have released Maestro 1.2.

One of the exciting developments is a re-emphasis on our contribution to the open source communities we participate in. Mergere has made significant contributions to open source over the last two years in terms of development resources, free services and the contribution of the first free book about Maven 2. These will, of course, continue – but as DevZuz, we have established specific roles and practices to improve our community involvement. Our aim is for our participation in those communities to be completely transparent.

Though DevZuz is not “the Maven company”, DevZuz is committed to making Maven and its subprojects successful as a community in it’s own right. In particular, we will be focusing on helping produce more frequent releases in the community, in addition to the tested Maestro product suite. You can expect a lot more to come in this area – and this is exciting news for Maven users and developers alike.

In addition to our continued participation in Maven, DevZuz is leading the Eclipse Kepler project proposal as a community effort.

I’m personally pleased with this direction – we have interesting and different problems to solve while continuing to focus on open source development.

I’m at ApacheCon in Amsterdam this week, and JavaOne next week. If you’re there, drop me a line and ask me a random Maven question (everyone else is!)

Maven Interview with the Java Posse

I had an opportunity to do an interview about Maven with the Java Posse podcast recently, which is now available.

We covered what Maven is all about, how it integrates with tools and IDEs, what being at the ASF means, and what Mergere is doing.

This is the first podcast that I started listening to, so it was great to be a part of it, and the interview was a lot of fun.

If you haven’t caught it before, I’d highly recommend giving it a listen – they have some good interviews along with regular news and listener feedback.