Normally, when you start a project, you set your required dependencies up with the latest stable versions of all libraries and plugins. Then time goes by, the project grows, and new features and libraries are added. But the versions of the 3rd-party dependencies and the plugins remains the same; the…

Fed up with waiting for the maven release? We’ve found a way to cut the release time by half. Each of our teams at Outbrain is responsible for its own service code in its own repository. However, our teams also share a large Maven-based repository that contains modules (libraries) that…

I still remember my first day at Outbrain. As part of the Bootcamp (training program), we were required to clone the code from a repository called the trunk (one monolithic repo that contained all our codebase). It took at least half a day to clone and build the whole source…

Caching is extremely important! It provides fast response time, enabling effortless performance improvements in certain use cases. At Outbrain, we have recently moved to Caffeine caching, after having used Guava in-memory caching for many years. Background Caffeine library is a rewrite of Guava’s cache that uses a Guava-inspired API that…

“Keep a developer learning and they’ll be happy working in a windowless basement eating stale food pushed through a slot in the door. And they’ll never ask for a raise.” — Rob Walling (https://robwalling.com/2006/10/31/nine-things-developers-want-more-than-money/) The past decade has produced substantial research verifying what may come as no surprise: developers want…

Production bugs are painful and can severely impact a dev team’s velocity. My team at Outbrain has succeeded in implementing a work process that enables us to send new features to production free of bugs, a process that incorporates automated functions with team discipline. Why should I even care? Bugs happen all the time —…