While working on a new Hippo CMS add-on I chose not to take the usual route by putting all my stuff on the Hippo Forge. My personal opinion about the forge is that it feels outdated, hard to navigate and lacks features with regards to what modern-day software developers would want. Sure the Hippo Forge gives us one central place to go to, but that can be solved by other solutions as well. For this particular project I chose to see how far I would come by combining different free for open source SaaS products and see how much value they could give me.
Personally I always like to read how other companies do software development, but sharing our way is probably just as interesting to others. In this post I will describe what a typical Hippo CMS development cycle looks like, how the product is build and how we do continuous integration at Hippo.
This post has been in draft mode for a couple of months now. I don’t know why it actually took this long to publish. Last year was a great year and a lot of things happened, so here goes.
I find that generating Maven project documentation is always a bit cumbersome with the default XDOC or APT (“Almost Plain Text”) syntaxes. This probably has to do with getting accustomed to using Markdown while doing my thing on GitHub, which is sort of the de facto standard there.
In my day to day job I’m a Java coder working on a MacBook Pro running OS X (Mountain Lion) and recently one thing started to really annoy me. While performing an Apache Maven build cycle occasionally an application pops up in my OS X dock and while browsing the web or composing an e-mail the focus is lost and moves to the just started application. In my case these applications are most of the time called Bootstrap or ForkedBooter.