Clone, clone, make: A better way to build

Dan Heidinga explains how a simple slogan revolutionized how IBM's J9 Java VM team creates the software that powers your Java applications and shares lessons learned from rearchitecting IBM's build pipeline around simplicity, in the process, becoming a key enabler for driving innovation throughout the product stack.

IBM’s Java team found themselves with a problem: their highly performant, cross-platform JVM was too hard to build. Multiple languages, source control systems, and custom tools were required to produce a source drop, with still more required to compile product binaries. Coupled with long test cycles, developers were spending more time babysitting changes through the build pipeline than developing features. Something needed to be done, so the slogan “clone, clone, make” was born—emphasizing that building software should be as simple as cloning one or two source repositories and running make. Dan Heidinga explains how a simple slogan revolutionized how IBM’s J9 Java VM team creates the software that powers your Java applications and shares lessons learned from rearchitecting IBM’s build pipeline around simplicity, in the process, becoming a key enabler for driving innovation throughout the product stack. Join Dan to learn how the team ruthlessly simplified IBM’s build pipeline, migrated source control systems, and battled a decades worth of technical debt, all while open sourcing parts of the virtual machine as the Eclipse OMR project.