Maintaining Maven at scale By Tim te Beek

Twenty years of history, over ninety repositories, maintained by volunteers, yet depended on by an entire ecosystem. That’s the Apache Maven project. This project sure has interesting challenges when it comes to development, and making the best use of volunteers’ time. New features and fixes might take priority over less glamorous clean up, yet all are needed to keep the project maintainable for the future. In this talk we will look at how we apply improvements to Apache Maven at scale. No one in their right mind would volunteer to make these changes by hand. But by using OpenRewrite and the Moderne platform, we can both leverage existing improvement recipes, as well as develop custom recipes for Apache Maven. We will outline some of the challenges, what’s already been done, what’s coming up next, and how you can help. Walk away with a little more appreciation for Apache Maven, a look behind the scenes of how it’s continuously improving, and how you can contribute, whether that’d be for Apache Maven, or any other community with similar challenges. TIM TE BEEK Tim te Beek is a staff software engineer at Moderne, which automates software refactoring at scale. He has extensive experience contributing to and presenting on Open Source software within the Java ecosystem. Previously he worked as a consultant specializing in migration engineering and developer productivity.