Now that I am back from OSCON and the Community Leadership Summit, I am catching up on some of the day to day community work. One important aspect is providing all Nexus users and beyond useful documentation and other related free assets like the numerous videos we recorded like:
- Nexus and Nexus Lifecycle: Tips from the Trenches
- Nexus Pro and Smart Proxy
- Empowering releases with the Nexus Staging Suite
- The Nexus 2 Minute Challenge
In terms of documentation we maintain a number of resources in an open source mode and work with the community to get them improved regularly. There is the documentation for Nexus in the form of the book Repository Management with Nexus. It introduces the concepts of repository management and software supply chain automation and covers all aspects of usage of Nexus 2 and the up and coming Nexus 3.
We have written the book Maven: The Definitive Guide and published it with OReilly in the past. This book has been split up, updated and expanded and is freely available as Maven by Example and Maven: The Complete Reference, right here on The Nexus Community.
And all these are available as open source projects on GitHub and we recently got a number of contributions again. It is really easy to help us out by creating an issue in the git repositories or even sending a pull request with fixes.
I recently had a chat with Andrew Janke, who contributed a bunch of fixes and improvements to the Maven books. I’ll share the conversation here:
Manfred: Tell me a bit more about your background and what you do in your day job?
Andrew: I’m a software developer. I got a Computer Science undergrad degree, worked for a software company for a while, and for the last ten years or so have been developing quantitative analysis tools and trading systems for the finance sector, specifically in energy trading. I write a lot of Matlab, Java, SQL, and Perl, depending on what part of the stack I’m working in.
Manfred: What is your interest in Apache Maven?
Andrew: The Java systems I build tend to have a lot of interrelated projects, each of which use many third-party Java libraries, with not-infrequent version changes. I’m looking for something to make it easier to manage those different libraries, simplify our build process, and reduce the size of our Git repos, while still keeping everything necessary to do a full build from scratch under version control. That seems like it’s right up Maven’s alley.
Manfred: How did you find the book Maven by Example?
Andrew: Google. It seems to be a go-to for many Maven users. And I was familiar from Sonatype from having downloaded libraries from the Central Repository before. Even though I don’t use Maven as a build system yet, it’s a great source for uniform, well-packaged Java library distributions.
Manfred: How did you figure out it is open source?
Andrew: I saw the GitHub link in the book’s preface. I know not everybody reads those, but I like to at least skim them.
Manfred: You seem to know AsciiDoc already. Is that true? And where from? What do you like about it?
Andrew: Actually, no. This is the first time I’ve really worked with AsciiDoc. I’d heard about it before, though, and it was a format I’m interested in because I’m looking for a better way to do documentation generation for my projects. So “Maven by Example” seemed like a good opportunity to get to learn it.
Manfred: How about some links to your website or other things you are working on?
Andrew: Most of my work has been proprietary, in-house stuff, and I’m just getting going with open source work. But you can find what little I’ve done on GitHub at https://github.com/apjanke.
Manfred: Thanks again for all your help.
Andrew: You’re welcome, and thanks for working with me.
You see, even if you never used asciidoc or github before, it is easy to get started and help out. At the minimum it might just be an email to resulting in fixes from our team. But there is no limit if you want to help out more.
We look forward to see what you contribute!
