Continuous Integration is pretty important today even for small to mid sized companies and their software development teams. When it comes to choosing a continuous integration server there are many proprietary and open source solutions available. In the enterprise world Jenkins appears to be the default option these days.

In my opinion CI servers are today becoming more important than ever. If you do DevOps and infrastructure-as-code you need tools that you can rely on for your automation tasks which are easy to maintain. I think Jenkins is not there (yet).

The TestTalks podcast is a great resource for anybody who is looking for inspiration in the field of QA, test automation and continuous integration. I recently have been given the honor of being interviewed by Joe Colantonio.

Mid of March 2016 I visited the RobotChallenge in Vienna. http://www.robotchallenge.org/

RobotChallenge is Europe's largest competition for autonomous robots. I was amazed to meet and exchange with teams from so many foreign countries. Since 2004 teams from 56 countries with more than 2,000 robots have competed in 15 different disciplines.

A few years ago I personally attended a talk delivered by Tony Hoare. Amongst other things I very much enjoyed his remarks on performance. I hope I will never forget and never fail to act on his famous quote "premature optimization is the root of all evil". I have seen the horrible results of hand optimizing Go code by default and I want to avoid that my codebase looks anything like that. Today I like to get started with some performance checks of the Go codebase I have been working on. Of cause I start with some profiling...

With better technologies, infrastructure and tools the database gets more and more attention. This is especially relevant with todays NoSQL movement in mind. Within this context scalability is a central subject of discussion and consequently performance is getting more important, too.