Let's start building the CI pipeline with the build stage. Even if you are not a Java developer or have no relation to Java, most programs go through a build stage.

The build process will take the source code and transform it into something that can be executed on a computer. We call this process compilation. In this case, the build process will translate source code into Java bytecode that can be executed on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). The output is a jar file (which is an archive) that contains this code.

To run the build process locally, I will use a tool called Gradle, which is just a build tool.