Preface

When I started my career as a software developer, I was blissfully unaware of the need for project automation. My tool of choice was the IDE, which allowed me to run all tasks required to fully automate my software development cycle. In 2003 Rainer Sawitzki,^[1] an external consultant to the project I was working on, introduced me to Apache Ant. I thought it was the most amazing thing to be able to describe my automation logic with the help of mostly pre-existing functionality and to execute it in a defined order. Despite the fact that the definition language was XML (these were the days when XML was still fashionable), I soon began to become more ambitious by creating artifacts for different target platforms, writing deployment logic for web containers, and setting up a continuous integration server.

¹ Thanks again for the object-oriented mindset I picked up by working with you. You’ve been a great mentor to me.