Jenkins World, September 13-15 at the Santa Clara Convention Center (SCCC), takes our 6th annual community user conference to a whole new level. It will be one big party for everything Jenkins, from users to developers, from the community to vendors. There will be more of what people always loved in past user conferences, such as technical sessions from users and developers, the Ask the Experts booth and plugin development workshop, and even more has been added, such as Jenkins training pre-conference, workshops and the opportunity to get certified for free. Jenkins World is a not-to-be-missed. For me, the best part of Jenkins World is the opportunity to meet other Jenkins users and developers face-to-face. We all interact on IRC, Google Groups or GitHub, but when you have a chance to meet in person, the person behind the GitHub ID or IRC name, whose plugin you use every day, becomes a real person. Your motivation might be a little different from mine, but we have the breath in the agenda to cover everyone from new users to senior plugin developers. This year, you’ll have more opportunities than ever before to learn about Jenkins and continuous delivery/DevOps practices, and explore what Jenkins has to offer. If you are travelling from somewhere, you might as well get a two-day Jenkins training course to be held onsite, starting Monday. On Tuesday, you can attend your choice of workshops, which gives you more hands-on time to go deeper, including: The DevOps Toolkit 2.0 Workshop Let’s Build a Jenkins Pipeline Preparing for Jenkins Certification Intro to Plugin Development CD and DevOps Maturity for Managers On Wednesday, the formal conference kicks off. Throughout Wednesday and Thursday, you can choose from sessions spread across five tracks and covering a diverse range of topics like infrastructure as code, security, containers, pipeline automation, best practices, scaling Jenkins and new community development initiatives. At Jenkins World, you’ll be exposed to projects going on in the community such as Blue Ocean, a new Jenkins UX project. You can learn more about Jenkins 2 - a major release for the project, and based on the huge number of downloads we saw in the weeks following its introduction at the end of April, it was a big +1. At Jenkins World, you will be immersed in Jenkins and community, and leave knowing that you are part of a meaningful open source project that, with your involvement, can do anything! This year there will only be one Jenkins World conference, so that everyone involved in Jenkins can get together in one place at one time and actually see each other. I understand that it might be a bit more difficult for Jenkins users outside of the US to make it to Jenkins World, but hopefully we made the event worth your visit. As the final push on the back, CloudBees has created a special international program for those who are coming from outside the United States. You’ll have time to talk with all of the other Jenkins users who have made the journey from across the globe, you’ll be able to attend exclusive networking events and more. I hope to see you September 13th through 15th in Santa Clara at Jenkins World in Santa Clara! Register for Jenkins World in September with the code JWFOSS for a 20% discount off your pass.

It’s been almost three months since we’ve released Jenkins 2.0, the first ever major version upgrade for this 10 year old project. The 2.x versions since then has been adopted by more than 20% of the users, but one segment of users who haven’t seen the benefits of Jenkins 2 is those who has been running LTS releases. But that is no more! The new version of Jenkins LTS release we just released is 2.7.1, and now LTS users get to finally enjoy Jenkins 2. This release also officially marks the end-of-life for Jenkins 1.x. There won’t be any future release of Jenkins 1.x beyond this point. If you are worried about the upgrade, don’t be! The core of Jenkins is still the same, and all the plugins & existing configuration will just work.

Over the past 10 years, Jenkins has really grown to a de-facto standard tool that millions of people use to handle automation in software development and beyond. It is quite remarkable for a project that originally started as a hobby project under a different name. I’m very proud. Around this time last year, we’ve celebrated 10 years, 1000 plugins, and 100K installations. That was a good time to retrospect, and we started thinking about the next 10 years of Jenkins and what’s necessary to meet that challenge. This project has long been on a weekly "train" release model, so it was useful to step back and think about a big picture. That is where three pillars of Jenkins 2.0 have emerged from. First, one of the challenges our users are facing today is that the automation that happens between a commit and a production has significantly grown in its scope. Because of this, the clothing that used to fit (aka "freestyle project", which was the workhorse of Jenkins) no longer fits. We now need something that better fits today’s use cases like "continuous delivery pipeline." This is why in 2.0 we’ve added the pipeline capability. This 2 year old effort allows you to describe your chain of automation in a textual form. This allows you to version control it, put it alongside your source tree, etc. It is also actually a domain specific language (DSL) of Groovy, so when your pipeline grows in complexity/sophistication, you can manage its complexity and keep it understandable far more easily. Second, over time, Jenkins has developed the "assembly required before initial use" feeling. As the project has grown, the frontier of interesting development has shifted to plugins, which is how it should be, but we have left it up to users to discover & use them. As a result, the default installation became very thin and minimal, and every user has to find several plugins before Jenkins becomes really functional. This created a paradox of choice and unnecessarily hurt the user experience. In 2.0, we reset this thinking and tried to create more sensible out of the box experience that solves 80% use cases for 80% of people. You get something useful out of the box, and you can get some considerable mileage out of it before you start feeling the need of plugins. This allows us to focus our development & QA effort around this base functionality, too. By the way, the focus on the out of the box experience doesn’t stop at functionality, either. The initial security setup of Jenkins is improved, too, to prevent unprotected Jenkins instances from getting abused by botnets and attacks. Third, we were fortunate to have a number of developers with UX background spend some quality time on Jenkins, and they have made a big dent in improving various parts of Jenkins web UI. The setup wizard that implements the out of the box experience improvement is one of them, and it also includes other parts of Jenkins that you use all the time, such as job configuration pages and new item pages. This brings much needed attention to the web UI. As you can see, 2.0 brings a lot of exciting features on the table, but this is an evolutionary release, built on top of the same foundation, so that your existing installations can upgrade smoothly. After this initial release, we’ll get back to our usual weekly release march. Improvements will be made to those pillars and others in coming months and years continuously. If you’d like to get a more in-depth look at Jenkins 2.0, please join us in our virtual Jenkins meetup 2.0 launch event. Thank you very much for everyone who made Jenkins 2.0 possible. There are too many of you to thank individually, but you know who you are. I wanted to thank CloudBees in particular for sponsoring the time of many of those people. Ten years ago, all I could utilize was my own night & weekend time. Now I’ve got a team of smart people working with me to carry this torch forward, and a big effort like 2.0 wouldn’t have been possible without such organized effort.

+ I hope many of you have had a chance to see https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/jenkinsci-dev/vbXK7JJekFw[the Jenkins 2.0 thread]. + I'm going to use https://wiki.jenkins.io/display/JENKINS/Office+Hours[the office hours next Wednesday] to go through this proposal. + + + + This is still primarily for developers in the project, as it's "just" a proposal with lots of details unspecified. It's more meant to help people understand where I'm coming from and what goals I have in mind for this effort. + + + + As always, this will be on Hangout on air. The event page is https://plus.google.com/events/co46heshe6i4io1dsaaj1h3th2c[here], and if you want to participate in the discussion, join https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/hoaevent/AP36tYfvk_ZBO4dCmxysNPfi-R5_xlkgscU-r9WDq_8zXDv6VnN3kg[here]. Read-only viewers should use https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl5xfqtiNko[YouTube] to watch, and you can still send questions in real time to IRC and I'll make sure to https://jenkins-ci.org/content/chat[go through them]. +

+ image:https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CN6MLZnUsAAj0RD.jpg[image,width=300] + + + + Boy, what a day! This is the 5th annual JUC in San Francisco bay area, and the crowd is getting bigger. + + + + I brought the LEGO Jenkins + CloudBees logo mosaic that we built at the CloudBees San Jose office: + + + image:https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CN6Cid3UEAEx5xK.jpg[image,width=500] + + + + The community booth was very busy. We have people like Dean Yu (board), Andrew Bayer (board), Mark Waite (git), Jesse Glick (workflow and core), Daniel Beck (core), Vincent Latombe (literate), Steven Christou (subversion) and Owen Mehegan (community outreach) talking to people all day long. + + + If you are here, make sure to stop by, and if you are not, follow news with https://twitter.com/search?q=%23jenkinsconf[#jenkinsconf].

Just as in past years, we are running a survey this year, to get some objective insights into what our users would like to see in the Jenkins project. Obviously, the developers in the project deal with individual bug reports and feature requests all the time, but sometimes those day-to-day issues distract you from a bigger picture. This year, we kept some of the questions the same, so that we can see the trend over time. But we also wanted to bring in some questions around how you are using Jenkins and what other technologies you leverage such as Linux containers and cloud services. The survey will close at the end of September and, if you participate, you’ll get to see the results first. CloudBees is sponsoring the survey and as an added incentive for us to fill it out, CloudBees has pitched in a $100 Amazon gift card (thanks CloudBees!). Information you submit is only going to be used by the community and not by CloudBees. So please take the survey and let your voice be heard. Finally, there are laws that govern prize giveaways like this and CloudBees has put up terms and conditions for this. Take the survey here

+ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_preserves[image:https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Welovejam_blenheim_apricot_jam.jpg[image]] + + + + A week ago https://jenkins-ci.org/content/bay-area-jenkins-area-meet-looking-you[we reported that Uday is looking at organizing a regular Jenkins meet-up in Silicon Valley]. This has made a progress since then, and this evening we'll get together to figure out logistics for the first meet-up: + + Time August 5th, Wednesday 6:30 PM - 7:30 PM Location Starbucks, 750 Castro St, Mountain View, CA 94041 + + + The agenda is: + + Determine the date for the first meet up Speakers for the second slot. Kohsuke will be presenting first. Future topics of interest for JAM Sponsors / Volunteers Ideas to make the JAM relevant and interesting for the extended community to participate and share their implementations Q & A + + + Uday and I will be there, and Uday told me that he heard from another guy who will join us. If you are around and is willing to come over, we'd love to see you. If you are interested, I'd also encourage you to join http://lists.jenkins-ci.org/mailman/listinfo/jenkins-events[the Jenkins events list], where a discussion is happening.

+ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_preserves[image:https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Welovejam_blenheim_apricot_jam.jpg[image]] + + + + Uday made a blog post yesterday that he is looking at organizing a regular Jenkins meet-up in the Silicon Valley Bay Area dubbed "Bay Area Jenkins Area Meetup (JAM)." + + + As a first step, he wants to have a kick-off meeting, to get more insights and opinions about what the topics could be and what people want to hear. I'm really looking forward to it as a means to build a local network, so I signed myself up as a speaker of the first meet-up. + + + If you are in the Peninsula, South Bay, East Bay, etc., please send some encouragements to him by posting a comment, or better yet, come to the kick-off meeting.