The other day, an email landed in my inbox with the question, “What makes developers happy?” At the moment, I was on my way to the sea in the Sierra. At a rest stop, I ordered a coffee, let my gaze wander over the mountains, and my thoughts drifted.

Well, of course, I can't speak for the entire developer community, but only about myself. This is also somewhat due to the fact that I have a fairly unconventional life concept. As a digital nomad, I found a new home in central Mexico many, many years ago. It’s always been important for me to combine the things that give me the most pleasure as harmoniously as possible. As with so many others, of course, my passion for travel has been considerably curtained in recent years. I compensate for this with small nature tours, where I get my inspiration. Freely after Goethe’s poem “Found”: “Into the forest, alone I went / To look for nothing, was my intent.”

Of course, my other passion is developing software systems. After nearly two decades of working with the Java platform, I found an ecosystem that I’ve learned to love and also demonize. I actually took my first steps with Java 2. When free IDEs like Eclipse and NetBeans appeared on the scene around 2005, I was overjoyed to have such tools at my disposal. Frameworks for Dependency Injection (DI) and Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) entered daily life for developers. These didn’t always make work easier. Using these new technologies created a new kind of complexity that often only brought benefits to projects if you had good knowledge of the tools.

Fig. 1: On the road in the Sierra

Fig. 2: Waiting for coffee - and letting my mind wander

With some innovative tools, especially the two build tools Apache Maven and Gradle, I miss a little bit of the innovation continuation that they started with. For example, Maven hasn’t further developed the concept of lifecycles. Lifecycles can be understood as a workflow. The original three clean, site, and build (default) still work as originally conceived, except for minor adjustments. Instead of working out additional flexible workflows for release, deploy, and other development processes, corresponding plug-ins were developed. These make the overall Maven project configuration increasingly confusing. The situation is similar to Gradle. Instead of focusing on a build/deploy DSL, in my opinion, Maven was merely reprogrammed without integrating supporting elements of a standardization. In the meantime, many companies are switching...