Google Summer of Code is much more than a summer internship program, it is a year-round effort for the organization and some community members. Now, after the DevOps World | Jenkins World conference in Lisbon and final retrospective meetings, we can say that GSoC 2019 is officially over. We would like to start by thanking all participants: students, mentors, subject matter experts and all other contributors who proposed project ideas, participated in student selection, in community bonding and in further discussions and reviews. Google Summer of Code is a major effort which would not be possible without the active participation of the Jenkins community. In this blogpost we would like to share the results and our experience from the previous year. Results Five GSoC projects were successfully completed this year: Role Strategy Plugin Performance Improvements, Plugins Installation Manager CLI Tool/Library, Working Hours Plugin - UI Improvements, Remoting over Apache Kafka with Kubernetes features, Multi-branch Pipeline support for Gitlab SCM. We will talk about the projects a little later in the document. Project details We held the final presentations as Jenkins Online Meetups in late August and Google published the results on Sept 3rd. The final presentations can be found here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. We also presented the 2019 Jenkins GSoC report at the DevOps World | Jenkins World San Francisco and at the DevOps World | Jenkins World 2019 Lisbon conferences. In the following sections, we present a brief summary of each project, links to the coding phase 3 presentations, and to the final products. Role Strategy Plugin Performance Improvements Role Strategy Plugin is one of the most widely used authorization plugins for Jenkins, but it has never been famous for performance due to architecture issues and regular expression checks for project roles. Abhyudaya Sharma was working on this project together with hist mentors: Oleg Nenashev, Runze Xia and Supun Wanniarachchi. He started the project from creating a new Micro-benchmarking Framework for Jenkins Plugins based on JMH, created benchmarks and achieved a 3501% improvement on some real-world scenarios. Then he went further and created a new Folder-based Authorization Strategy Plugin which offers even better performance for Jenkins instances where permissions are scoped to folders. During his project Abhyudaya also fixed the Jenkins Configuration-as-Code support in Role Strategy and contributed several improvements and fixes to the JCasC Plugin itself. Project page Blog posts: Micro-benchmarking Framework for Jenkins Plugins, Introducing new Folder Authorization Plugin, Performance Improvements to Role Strategy Plugin Final evaluation: slides, video Source code: Role Strategy Plugin, Folder Authorization Plugin Plugins Installation Manager CLI Tool/Library Natasha Stopa was working on a new CLI tool for plugin management, which should unify features available in other tools like install-plugins.sh in Docker images. It also introduced many new features like YAML configuration format support, listing of available updates and security fixes. The newly created tool should eventually replace the previous ones. Natasha’s mentors: Kristin Whetstone, Jon Brohauge and Arnab Banerjee. Also, many contributors from Platform SIG and JCasC plugin team joined the project as a key stakeholders and subject-matter experts. Project page Blog posts: alpha release announcement, coding phase 2 updates Final evaluation: slides, video Source code: Plugin installation manager tool Working Hours Plugin - UI Improvements Jenkins UI and frontend framework are a common topic in the Jenkins project, especially in recent months after the new UX SIG was established. Jack Shen was working on exploring new ways to build Jenkins Web UI together with his mentor Jeff Pearce. Jack updated the Working Hours Plugin to use UI controls provided by standard React libraries. Then he documented his experienced and created template for plugins with React-based UI. Project page Blog posts: Updates on Working Hours Plugin UI, React Plugin Template Final evaluation: slides, video Source code: Working Hours Plugin, Template for Jenkins plugins with React-based UI Remoting over Apache Kafka with Kubernetes features Long Le Vu Nguyen was working on extended Kubernetes support in the Remoting over Apache Kafka Plugin. His mentors were Andrey Falco and Pham vu Tuan who was our GSoC 2018 student and the plugin creator. During this project Long has added a new agent launcher which provisions Jenkins agents in Kubernetes and connects them to the controller. He also created a Cloud API implementation for it and a new Helm chart which can provision Jenkins as entire system in Kubernetes, with Apache Kafka enabled by default. All these features were released in Remoting over Apache Kafka Plugin 2.0. Project page Blog post for [Remoting over Apache Kafka Plugin 2.0 Final evaluation: slides, video Plugin source code Multi-branch Pipeline support for Gitlab SCM Parichay Barpanda was working on the new GitLab Branch Source Plugin with Multi-branch Pipeline Jobs and Folder Organisation support. His mentors were Marky Jackson-Taulia, Justin Harringa, Zhao Xiaojie and Joseph Petersen. The plugin scans the projects, importing the pipeline jobs it identifies based on the criteria provided. After a project is imported, Jenkins immediately runs the jobs based on the Jenkinsfile pipeline script and notifies the status to GitLab Pipeline Status. This plugin also provides GitLab server configuration which can be configured in Configure System or via Jenkins Configuration as Code (JCasC). read more about this project in the GitLab Branch Source 1.0 announcement. Project page Coding phase 3 presentation Gitlab Branch Source Plugin, Gitlab API plugin Projects which were not completed Not all projects have been completed this year. We were also working on Artifact Promotion plugin for Jenkins Pipeline and on Cloud Features for External Workspace Manager Plugin, but unfortunately both projects were stopped after coding phase 1. Anyway, we got a lot of experience and takeaways in these areas (see linked Jira tickets!. We hope that these stories will be implemented by Jenkins contributors at some point. Google Summer of Code 2020 maybe? Running the GSoC program at our organization level Here are some of the things our organization did before and during GSoC behind the scenes. To prepare for the influx of students, we updated all our GSoC pages and wrote down all the knowledge we accumulated over the years of running the program. We started preparing in October 2018, long before the official start of the program. The main objective was to address the feedback we got during GSoC 2018 retrospectives. Project ideas. We started gathering project ideas in the last months of 2018. We prepared a list of project ideas in a Google doc, and we tracked ownership of each project in a table of that document. Each project idea was further elaborated in its own Google doc. We find that when projects get complicated during the definition phase, perhaps they are really too complicated and should not be done. Since we wanted all the project ideas to be documented the same way, we created a template to guide the contributors. Most of the project idea documents were written by org admins or mentors, but occasionally a student proposed a genuine idea. We also captured contact information in that document such as GitHub and Gitter handles, and a preliminary list of potential mentors for the project. We embedded all the project documents on our website. Mentor and student guidelines. We updated the mentor information page with details on what we expect mentors to do during the program, including the number of hours that are expected from mentors, and we even have a section on preventing conflict of interest. When we recruit mentors, we point them to the mentor information page. We also updated the student information page. We find this is a huge time saver as every student contacting us has the same questions about joining and participating in the program. Instead of re-explaining the program each time, we send them a link to those pages. Application phase. Students started to reach out very early on as well, many weeks before GSoC officially started. This was very motivating. Some students even started to work on project ideas before the official start of the program. Project selection. This year the org admin team had some very difficult decisions to make. With lots of students, lots of projects and lots of mentors, we had to request the right number of slots and try to match the projects with the most chances of success. We were trying to form mentor teams at the same time as we were requesting the number of slots, and it was hard to get responses from all mentors in time for the deadline. Finally we requested fewer slots than we could have filled. When we request slots, we submit two numbers: a minimum and a maximum. The GSoC guide states that: The minimum is based on the projects that are so amazing they really want to see these projects occur over the summer, and the maximum number should be the number of solid and amazing projects they wish to mentor over the summer. We were awarded minimum. So we had to make very hard decisions: we had to decide between "amazing" and "solid" proposals. For some proposals, the very outstanding ones, it’s easy. But for the others, it’s hard. We know we cannot make the perfect decision, and by experience, we know that some students or some mentors will not be able to complete the program due to uncontrollable life events, even for the outstanding proposals. So we have to make the best decision knowing that some of our choices won’t complete the program. Community Bonding. We have found that the community bonding phase was crucial to the success of each project. Usually projects that don’t do well during community bonding have difficulties later on. In order to get students involved in the community better, almost all projects were handled under the umbrella of Special Interest Groups so that there were more stakeholders and communications. Communications. Every year we have students who contact mentors via personal messages. Students, if you are reading this, please do NOT send us personal messages about the projects, you will not receive any preferential treatment. Obviously, in open source we want all discussions to be public, so students have to be reminded of that regularly. In 2019 we are using Gitter chat for most communications, but from an admin point of view this is more fragmented than mailing lists. It is also harder to search. Chat rooms are very convenient because they are focused, but from an admin point of view, the lack of threads in Gitter makes it hard to get an overview. Gitter threads were added recently (Nov 2019) but do not yet work well on Android and iOS. We adopted Zoom Meetings towards the end of the program and we are finding it easier to work with than Google Hangouts. Status tracking. Another thing that was hard was to get an overview of how all the projects were doing once they were running. We made extensive use of Google sheets to track lists of projects and participants during the program to rank projects and to track statuses of project phases (community bonding, coding, etc.). It is a challenge to keep these sheets up to date, as each project involves several people and several links. We have found it time consuming and a bit hard to keep these sheets up to date, accurate and complete, especially up until the start of the coding phase. Perhaps some kind of objective tracking tool would help. We used Jenkins Jira for tracking projects, with each phase representing a separate sprint. It helped a lot for successful projects. In our organization, we try to get everyone to beat the deadlines by a couple of days, because we know that there might be events such as power outages, bad weather (happens even in Seattle!), or other uncontrolled interruptions, that might interfere with submitting project data. We also know that when deadlines coincide with weekends, there is a risk that people may forget. Retrospective. At the end of our project, we also held a retrospective and captured some ideas for the future. You can find the notes here. We already addressed the most important comments in our documentation and project ideas for the next year. Recognition Last year, we wanted to thank everyone who participated in the program by sending swag. This year, we collected all the mailing addresses we could and sent to everyone we could the 15-year Jenkins special edition T-shirt, and some stickers. This was a great feel good moment. I want to personally thank Alyssa Tong her help on setting aside the t-shirt and stickers. Mentor summit Each year Google invites two or more mentors from each organization to the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit. At this event, hundreds of open-source project maintainers and mentors meet together and have unconference sessions targeting GSoC, community management and various tools. This year the summit was held in Munich, and we sent Marky Jackson and Oleg Nenashev as representatives there. Apart from discussing projects and sharing chocolate, we also presented Jenkins there, conducted a lightning talk and hosted the unconference session about automation bots for GitHub. We did not make a team photo there, so try to find Oleg and Marky on this photo: GSoC Team at DevOps World | Jenkins World We traditionally use GSoC organization payments and travel grants to sponsor student trips to major Jenkins-related events. This year four students traveled to the DevOps World | Jenkins World conferences in San-Francisco and Lisbon. Students presented their projects at the community booth and at the contributor summits, and their presentations got a lot of traction in the community! Thanks a lot to Google and CloudBees who made these trips possible. You can find a travel report from Natasha Stopa here, more travel reports are coming soon. Conclusion This year, five projects were successfully completed. We find this to be normal and in line with what we hear from other participating organizations. Taking the time early to update our GSoC pages saved us a lot of time later because we did not have to repeat all the information every time someone contacted us. We find that keeping track of all the mentors, the students, the projects, and the meta information is a necessary but time consuming task. We wish we had a tool to help us do that. Coordinating meetings and reminding participants of what needs to be accomplished for deadlines is part of the cheerleading aspect of GSoC, we need to keep doing this. Lastly, I want to thank again all participants, we could not do this without you. Each year we are impressed by the students who do great work and bring great contributions to the Jenkins community. GSoC 2020? Yes, there will be Google Summer of Code 2020! We plan to participate, and we are looking for project ideas, mentors and students. Jenkins GSoC pages have been already updated towards the next year, and we invite everybody interested to join us next year! Main page with all contacts GSoC 2020 Project Ideas GSoC 2020 Call for Mentors and Project Ideas Information for students and mentors

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is as program where students are paid a stipend by Google to work on a free open source project. Students work on the project full-time for four months (May to August). Mentors are actively involved with students starting at the end of February when students start to work on and submit their applications. (see the timeline) We are looking for project ideas and mentors to participate in GSoC 2020. GSoC project ideas are coding projects that university or college students can accomplish in about four months. The coding projects can be new features, plugins, test frameworks, infrastructure, etc. Anyone can submit a project idea, but of course we like it even better if you offer to mentor your project idea. We accept new project ideas at any time, BUT we need a series of ideas READY before February 5th, 2020 at 7pm UTC, which is the deadline for the Jenkins organization to apply to the GSoC program. So send us your project ideas before the beginning of February so they can get a proper review by the GSoC committee and by the community. How to submit a project idea For 2020, we have simplified the process. Simply create a pull-request with your idea in a.adoc file in the idea folder. It is no longer necessary to submit a Google Doc, but it will still work if you want to do that. See the instructions on submitting ideas which include an.adoc template and some examples. Current list of ideas We currently have a list of project ideas for students to browse, copied from last year. Note that this list is subject to change. What does mentoring involve? Potential mentors are invited to read the information for mentors. Note that being a GSoC mentor does not require expert knowledge of Jenkins. Mentors do not work alone. We make sure that every project has at least two mentors. GSoC org admins will help to find technical advisers, so you can study together with your students. Mentoring takes about 5 to 8 hours of work per week (more at the start, less at the end). Mentors provide guidance, coaching, and sometimes a bit of cheerleading. They review student proposals, pull-requests and the students presentations at the evaluation phase. They fill in the Google provided evaluation report form at the end of coding periods. What do you get in exchange? In return of mentoring, a student works on your project full time for four months. Think about the projects that you’ve always wanted to do but never had the time…​ Having a mentoring opportunity also means that you get to improve your management and people skills. As well, up to two mentors per organization are eligible to participate in the Google Mentor Summit taking place each year. The Jenkins Org Admins try to send different mentors each year. It is also possible to win an additional seat at the summit in the "last minute draw" (Google draws mentors at random to fill the cancellations and empty seats). See this post from one of the 2019 mentors on the kind of experience this was. GSoC is a pretty good return on the investment! For any question, you can find the GSoC Org Admins, mentors and participants on the GSoC SIG Gitter chat.

Google Summer of Code is as program where students are paid a stipend by Google to work on a free open source project like Jenkins, at full-time for four months (May to August). Mentors get actively involved with students starting at the end of February when students start to apply (see the timeline). We are looking for mentors and project ideas to participate in the 15th edition of the Google Summer of Code program! We have until February 6th, 2019 at 8pm UTC to submit the application on behalf the Jenkins Organization, but obviously, we want to be ready before that. The first step in the process is to have mentors and project ideas. Then we will apply to Google. We need Google to accept Jenkins' application to the program itself. And for this to happen, we need project proposals and mentors. We currently have a list of project idea proposals, and we are looking for new project proposals, mentors, technical advisers, and subject matter experts. GSoC projects may be about anything around code: new features, plugins, test frameworks, infrastructure, etc., etc. Making a project idea proposal is easy, you can read the instructions here. Quick start: Copy the project proposal template, add a short description of your project idea Open the document for public view and comments, reference communication channels there (if any) Let us know about the project idea via our gitter channel or the mailing list. After getting initial feedback from org admins, share your idea with other contributors who might be interested (via the developer mailing list, chats, or special interest groups) Potential mentors are invited to read the information for mentors for more information about the project. Note that being a GSoC mentor does not require expert knowledge of Jenkins. GSoC org admins will help to find technical advisors, so you can study together with your students. Mentoring takes about 5 to 6 hours of work per week (more at the start, less at the end). In return, a student works on your project full time for four months. Think about the projects that you’ve always wanted to do but could not find the time…​ There are also many opportunities to engage with the Jenkins community (meetups, knowledge sharing, communications) and with other projects (e.g. going to the GSoC Mentor Summit). GSoC is a pretty good return on the investment! For any question, you can find the GSoC admins, mentors and participants on the GSoC SIG Gitter chat. The Jenkins GSoC Org Admin Team 2019

This year, the Jenkins organization participated in the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit at the Google office in Sunnyvale on Oct 12, 13 and 14, 2018. The GSoC Mentor Summit is where mentors of all organizations participating in the GSoC program are invited each year to learn and network with mentors from other organization, and make GSoC a better program. This is the second time Jenkins mentors have participated in the summit, the first time was in 2016. Exceptionally, three Jenkins GSoC mentors were invited to the summit this year. Normally only two mentors are invited, but when there are cancellations, Google draws a name at random from the waiting list, and the Jenkins organization was lucky enough and sent an extra mentor this year! The mentors participating this year were Oleg Nenashev, Jeff Pearce and Martin d’Anjou. It is worth mentioning that the Mentor Summit is not a typical conference where you go sit and listen at what speakers have to say, quite the contrary. The Mentor Summit is an unconference where participants are invited to fill empty time slots with their own topic of discussion. Friday Oct 12 Pre-conference meeting The mentors had a short pre-conference meeting to reflect on the Jenkins participation in the 2018 GSoC program, and to plan for 2019. We were joined at this meeting by Lloyd Chang, whom we had met at Jenkins World 2018. Thank you Lloyd for joining us! A few ideas we had for 2019 are: Move project proposals to individual Google Documents Create a template for project proposed by potential mentors and by project champions Create an Organization Administrator Guide for future Jenkins GSoC project admins Other preparations we agreed to work on include a review of the 2018 feedback and the creation of an Epic capturing the action items in preparation for 2019. We are also planning on making progress on the GSoC Budget process described in JEP-8. Summit Starts! The summit started by a welcoming dinner at the Google Cafeteria and an evening session where we were explained how the unconference would work. We proposed a few topics: dealing with CPT lost slots, motivating mentors, and Open Source Hardware ASIC/FPGA. On thing to say is that everyone at the conference had heard of Jenkins, or was already using Jenkins. Lots of people came to tell us their Jenkins experience. I noticed this too - made me feel proud to be part of the Jenkins project. — Jeff Pearce Jenkins GSoC mentor in 2018 Saturday Oct 13 The morning started with a couple of announcements from Google. The first one was that Google is thinking of creating a program called "Google Season of Docs" (GSoD for short), where technical writers would be paired with Open Source Organizations to help them write documentation such as: High-impact tutorials Set of How-To Guides Contributor’s Guide Documentation refactoring Plain documentation We have additional details regarding this in the GSoC Mentor Summit Notes and we quickly concluded that if this program comes to life, Jenkins should be a participating organization. The other announcement made by the GSoC administrators is that GSoC may take a different form in 2020. However, not much more information has been made available at this time. The program has been operating for 13 years, and in 2020 it will have been 15 years. The announcements were followed by a series of morning lightning talks. This is where organizations showcase what their students accomplished during the program. This is when we had a bit of a surprise…​ Oleg who had signed up for the evening lightning talks, was watching the talks while casually preparing slides for his evening presentation. But something unusual happened: many talks were shorter than the 3-minute allotted, and suddenly we were ahead of schedule. That’s when Oleg was called to the stage. I had no idea whether his slides were ready or not since he had just leaned over to me to say that he wanted to talk about all 3 projects we had this year. Not knowing how far he had gotten into refactoring the slides, this was going to be…​ interesting. Being an experienced presenter, Oleg pulled it off brilliantly. The slides were effectively ready (how he managed that I have no idea), but you can see the slides of his lightning talk here: Jenkins Remoting over Apache Kafka. Then there were the unconference sessions. Some of the sessions we attended are: Documentation Attracting and retaining mentors (facilitated by Martin) Organizing and motivating volunteers and mentors Getting students from coding/boot camps involved in open source Retaining students after GSoC Open Event management System GSoC Feedback We have notes for all the session in the main document. Some sessions were captured in separated documents which are linked from the main document, or from this blog post. There were lots of good ideas in those sessions, and we will do what we can next year to implement some of them. Some organizations have said that the key for student retention is to give them responsibilities and tasks after the program is over. We have certainly seen that this year, with one of our students asking for more responsibilities and wanting to know how his plugin project could continue to grow within the Jenkins project (while at the same time help out on another GSoC plugin!). In the evening was the second round of lightning talks. Jeff Pearce presented the Code Coverage API Plugin lightning talk, (he was not caught by surprise). After the lightning talks, we were invited to hang out at the cafeteria and on the patio, to exchange stickers, network with mentors of other organizations, and enjoy late evening snacks, music and of course the chocolate table! Sunday Oct 14 On Sunday, the sessions continued. An interesting session was "Beyond GSoC, What can Google do?". One person got a big round of applause when he said: "Cloud credits". It turns out the GSoC program admins have been trying to get that for us for about 3 years. Google may be big and powerful, but some things are hard and remain hard in the corporate world. An interesting suggestion was made by Oleg, and it would be to have a program with smaller, shorter term commitments, something that would encourage more granular contributions but would not require a 4-month long commitment. This was noted by the GSoC program admins. Then we attended a number of sessions: Open Hardware ASIC/FPGA (facilitated by Martin) Community Metrics Outreachy (Jenkins is participating in this program) Failing a student Burnout (of mentors and org admins) Then the day came to an end with some last words by Google thanking all the mentors and volunteers who run this program in their organizations. Return trip I would now like to add a personal note. After the summit, like many others I fly back home, so I spend the evening at the SFO international terminal waiting for my late night flight. That is where I get to meet more mentors, as some of us still wear our badges and T-Shirts, and also recognize each other from being at the conference. And funny enough, there are so many geeks at that terminal that we may have recruited, among the passengers, a mentor to another org for next year! Want a GSoC student to work on your project in 2019? We have already started the preparations for GSoC 2019. And we cannot do this without the participation of the Jenkins community. We are already looking for: Mentors from the Jenkins Special Interest Groups Mentors from any background and any provenance (being a Jenkins developer is NOT required) Project proposals Students and their proposals Lots of people are afraid that mentoring a student will take a lot of their time. If you feel that way, you are not alone. It does take some time. In my case, I spend 5 to 8 hours per week on mentor tasks (more at the start, less at the end). To make it easier on mentors who likely have full time jobs and life commitments, we define different mentor roles: Project champion co-mentor : this is the mentor who proposes the idea, but may not have all the Jenkins code expertise needed. This mentor works with the student to define the project and acts mostly as a "customer" of the project. This mentor usually know enough about coding to comment on pull-requests with regards to the over quality, style and features of the code. Technical co-mentor : this is the mentor who knows enough about the Jenkins code to guide the student on coding, and to provide Jenkins specific code reviews on pull-requests, but has limited involvement outside the coding activity of the student. There is a third role which is: Subject Matter Expert : these individuals are not mentors, but we reach out to them 3-4 times during the project for advice and guidance, and sometimes complicated programming challenges. If you have questions or are curious about the program, contact us on the GSoC Gitter SIG chat. We would like to emphasize that project proposals are not limited to "big projects". For example, it is perfectly fine to have a proposal that is a collection of related Jira issues that aim to improve your project, or a list of tasks that need to be done for your project. Writing documentation is outside the scope of GSoC, but automating documentation generation, as long as it is mostly about writing code, is within the scope of GSoC. We look forward working with the Jenkins community on GSoC 2019!