Publishing to Maven Central sounds simple… until it isn’t. In this talk, I’ll share a decade’s worth of lessons learned from publishing open source libraries to Maven Central and other repositories. From GPG key nightmares and Gradle plugin magic to simplify your publishing workflow: those are the tips wish you knew earlier. If you’ve ever fought with .pom files, staging repositories, or just want to understand how to go from a gradlew publish to GitHub download badge, this talk is for you. Expect incident stories, practical tips, and a series of do’s and don’ts to don’t be miserable when publishing to Central and making your next release smooth and drama-free!