N.B. This post has lived on my machine as a draft for 5 (five!) years. It doesn’t really say a great deal; I’m publishing it, more than anything else, in commemoration of my 15 minutes of LinkedIn fame.

It took no less than a week of COVID-19 lockdown for me to deteriorate to a point where Gradle’s plugin architecture began to look interesting. Failed builds are my thing and I have recently come into possession of some Philips Hue bulbs (free with a television, no Yorkshireman pays that much for a bulb) so I ventured to a new frontier: the intersection of Gradle plugins and smart home technology.

I posted a short demo of the plugin in action to LinkedIn:

and people seemed to share my enthusiasm. It even made it to the top of /r/ProgrammerHumor for a day or two.

Docs around hooking into the TestListener were quite poor but after a bit of digging I found the code reasonably easy to grok and the Gradle lifecycle itself fairly intuitive. The plugin is mainly a thin wrapper around the ‘yetanotherhueapi’ library so there’s little point giving full a play-by-play.

You can find the source here.