Documentation is not glamorous, but it is goodness. — Thomas Otter Jenkins technical documentation is an important part of our project as it is key to using Jenkins well. Good documentation guides users and encourages good implementation choices. It is a crucial part of the user experience. In the recent Jenkins UI/UX hackfest, documentation was a specific track to improve the Jenkins user experience. We received many improvements from experienced Jenkins contributors and newcomers alike. Contributors from all around the world submitted pull requests for documentation on installing, managing, administering, and operating Jenkins. Documentation migration from Wiki The Jenkins Wiki pages have collected 15 years of experience and wisdom for Jenkins users. However, that experience and wisdom is intermixed with inaccurate, incomplete, and outdated information. The Jenkins Wiki migration project identified the 50 most accessed pages on the Jenkins wiki and created GitHub issues to track the migration of those pages to www.jenkins.io. This was our first large scale experiment using GitHub issues for documentation. The results have been overwhelmingly positive. Hackfest contributors added new sections to many documentation chapters, including: Using Jenkins Pipeline Managing Jenkins System Administration The Hackfest closed 19 of the wiki migration issues. Work is in progress on an additional 25 wiki migration issues. We’ve made great progress and look forward to even better results in the future. New contributors used the "good first issue" label very effectively. We started the Hackfest with most of the 25 "good first issues" unassigned and completed the Hackfest with 14 closed and 10 others in progress. We’ll provide more "good first issues" as we use the Jenkins Wiki migration to welcome new documentation contributors. Migrating plugin documentation Plugin documentation is also in transition. Since November 2019, plugins have been moving their documentation into the GitHub repository that hosts the plugin source code. This"documentation as code" approach allows plugin maintainers to include documentation improvements in the same pull requests that implement new capabilities. It assures that documentation changes are reviewed by the same maintainers who review and approve new capabilities. Hackfest participants submitted pull requests to migrate plugin documentation to GitHub. 10 plugin pull requests are in progress from the Hackfest. 5 plugin pull requests from the Hackfest have been already merged and are awaiting the release of the plugin. Chuck Norris uses documentation as code In the spirit of fun and adventure, Oleg Nenashev migrated the "Chuck Norris plugin" to GitHub documentation as code in a live Hackfest presentation May 26, 2020. Links to the recording, the plugin migration guide, and the export tool are available from"Migrating plugins to documentation-as-code". Documentation updates Jenkins works with other technologies to solve automation challenges in many different environments. We describe those environments in our"Solution Pages". As part of the Hackfest, we’ve started a series of improvements to the solution pages. The Docker solutions page now includes updated videos and a better page layout for easier reading and better navigation. Other solution pages will receive similar improvements in the future. System properties The global configuration of Jenkins can be modified at startup by defining Java properties. System properties can change system defaults and can provide compatibility "escape hatches" when a new default configuration might be incompatible with existing installations. Daniel Beck has improved the navigation and user experience of the system properties page as part of the Hackfest. It is now much easier to read and to reference, with embeddable links available with a mouse-over to the right of every property and labels that categorize and classify each property. Plugin site improvements During the Hackfest, Gavin Mogan has continued his efforts to improve the Jenkins Plugins Site so that users can easily access plugin changelogs and reported issues. Once this pull request is merged, it will greatly improve the experience of those Jenkins users who want to update plugins and look for documentation about what has changed in them and what are the possible issues they might experience. Example of the incoming UI for the Jira plugin: What’s next? There is still much to do in Jenkins documentation and we need your help to do it. There are many ways to participate in the Jenkins project, including documentation. See the contributing guidelines for detailed instructions. Join the documentation chat for personalized help and encouragement. The Jenkins project has been also accepted to Google Season of Docs this year. This open-source mentorship program brings together open source and technical writers communities for the benefit of both. We are looking for technical writers who are interested to contribute to the project in September-December 2020. It is a great opportunity to study Documentation-as-code tools and to learn more about contributing to open-source projects. You can find Jenkins project ideas and more information here.

The Jenkins community is conducting the 2019 elections for Board and Officer positions. The call for nominations has concluded. We received many nominations. Based on the people who are willing to accept their nomination and the uncontested officer positions, we will have 3 votes: A vote to elect 3 board members A vote to elect the Jenkins security officer A vote to elect the Jenkins events officer Candidates Each candidate has provided a statement to help guide voters on why they should vote for the candidate. Refer to the candidate statements for more details. The candidates running for a board position are: Alex Earl Oliver Gondza Ullrich Hafner Oleg Nenashev Mark Waite Zhao Xiaojie (a.k.a. Rick to many of you) The candidates running for Security Officer are: Daniel Beck Wadeck Follonier The candidates running for Events Officer are: Alyssa Tong Zhao Xiaojie (a.k.a. Rick to many of you) Voter Registration This is the first time in a while that we are running a Jenkins election; we are learning as we go. Jenkins elections aim to be very inclusive. We do not restrict elections to just code committers. Anyone who has a Jenkins account registered before September 1, 2019 is eligible to vote. Jenkins, being the successful project it is, has approximately 100 000 accounts that meet that criteria. As a result we are contacting eligible voters and requesting that they explicitly ‘opt-in’ to participate in the voting. If you meet the criteria, you will receive an email at your registered jenkins.io email address. It will be from elections@jenkins.io with the title ‘ 2019 Jenkins Election - Invitation to Participate ’. The email will provide election details and will include an " I want to participate" button. Voter Confirmation Once you click on the link, you should see a confirmation screen as follows: If you do not receive the email by November 14, 2019 or if you have any problems voting, please comment on the Jenkins Election 2019 Jira issue. Voting The voting will officially open on November 11, 2019. Candidates will receive an email from the Condorcet internet voting sent by Kohsuke Kawaguchi. One email will be sent for each vote (so 3 in total: 1 for board, 1 for event officer and 1 for security officer). The vote will ask to rank the candidates using a screen like this: Election Dates Here is a summary of the key election dates: Date Event Now Voter registration ongoing Nov 11, 2019 Voting begins Nov 17, 2019 Voter registration closes Nov 24, 2019 Voting closes a 5:00 PM Pacific Time Dec 3, 2019 New representatives announced Election results will be posted to the Jenkins developer mailing list, followed by an announcement blog post on jenkins.io. If there are any delays to the proposed dates we will aim to communicate that as soon as we can. Thank you very much for all the candidates showing the Jenkins spirit of service to their community. We encourage everyone to register to vote and participate in the Jenkins community. Uncontested Officer Positions When an officer position has only one candidate that is willing to accept the nomination, there is no reason to vote on that position. The individual becomes an officer as the sole candidate for the position. Uncontested officers include: Name Role Olivier Vernin Infrastructure Officer Oliver Gondza Release Officer Mark Waite Documentation Officer References Jenkins Governance Board Jenkins Board Election Process Jenkins Officers Announcement in the developer mailing list 2019 elections proposal in the developer mailing list

The Jenkins Contributor summit is where the current and future contributors of the Jenkins project get together. This summit will be on Tuesday, October 23rd 2018 in Nice, France just before Jenkins World. What should those planning on joining expect at the event? Earlier this year in September we had a contributor summit in San Francisco which gave us a pretty good outline of what to expect. First of all it was one of the biggest contributor summits ever with lots of first-time attendees. Morning There are plenty of exciting developments happening in the Jenkins community, which meant there was a packed program. One of the most anticipated updates was Kohsuke Kawaguchi speaking about Jenkins Shifting Gears. There were also updates on the '5 Jenkins Superpower' projects in active development: Jenkins Evergreen Jenkins X Configuration as Code Jenkins Pipeline Cloud Native Jenkins As ever Jenkins is a community driven by its members so it was also great to get an update on Google Summer of Code. Birds-of-a-feather (BoF) After a packed morning of updates, it was time for a break and some lunch. After lunch attendees divided up into groups and gathered around tables for unconference style discussions of specific areas. Each table ran differently: some had demos, some did presentations, some hacked on code and others brainstormed ideas. There was definitely alot of energy in the room and huge exchange of ideas. Ignite Talks & Wrap-up To finish off the session we had a set of ignite talks. Attendees were invited to volunteer on the day - no easy task given the pressure involved- and many did. Hats off to Liam Newman, Mandy Hubbard, Eric Smalling, Pui Chee Chan, Martin d’Anjou and Vishal Raina for getting out of their comfort zone and doing talks. There were two surprise ignite talks, one for James Strachan and one for Kohsuke Kawaguchi which were highly entertaining gave the audience lots of laughs. Someone even captured KK’s talk on video. The sound isn’t great but it was a truly visionary talk: Finally the event finished with swag presentations and a fun Kahoot quiz to wrap things up. Contributor Appreciation Event After the summit, contributors were invited to join at the after party at Spin. Spin was a unique venue in San Francisco where attendees could socialise and also play ping-pong! While some took it seriously most enjoyed the relaxed way to get to know their fellow contributors. See you in Nice The event was a lot of fun and the contributor summit in Nice will follow a very similar structure. All levels of contributor are welcome, there will be lots of opportunity for in-depth discussions and you can even do an ignite talk! While we won’t be repeating the ping pong event there will be something equally unique to follow on from the summit. Attending is free, and no DevOps World | Jenkins World ticket is needed, but RSVP if you are going to attend to help us plan. See you there! As long as you’re in Nice for the Contributor Summit, join Tracy, Kohsuke, and hundreds of other Jenkins users at DevOps World - Jenkins World on October 22-25. Register with the code JWFOSS for a 30% discount off your pass.

The Jenkins Contributor summit is where the current and future contributors of the Jenkins project get together. This summit will be on Tuesday, October 23rd 2018 in Nice, France just before Jenkins World. The summit brings together community members to learn, meet and help shape the future of Jenkins. In the Jenkins commmunity we value all types and sizes of contributions and love to welcome new participants. It is free to join, just register here. Topics There are plenty of exciting developments happening in the Jenkins community. The summit will feature a 'State of the Project' update including updates from the Jenkins officers. We will also have updates on the 'Big 5' projects in active development: Jenkins Evergreen Jenkins X Configuration as Code Jenkins Pipeline Cloud Native Jenkins Plus we will feature a Google Summer of Code update, Special Interest Group updates and more! Agenda The agenda is shaping up well and here is the outline so far. 9:00am Kickoff & Welcome with coffee/pastries 10:00am Project Updates 12:00pm Lunch 1.00pm BoF/Unconference 3.00pm Break 3.30pm Ignite Talks 5.00pm Wrap-up 6.00pm Contributor Dinner The BoF (birds-of-a-feather) session will be an opportunity for in depth discussions, hacking or learning more about any of the big 5. Bring your laptop, come prepared with questions and ideas, and be ready for some hacking too if you want. Join in, hear the latest and get involved in any project during the BoF sessions. If you want to share anything there will be an opportunity to do a 5-min ignite talk at the end. Attending is free, and no DevOps World | Jenkins World ticket is needed, but RSVP if you are going to attend to help us plan. See you there!

Everyone is talking about serverless. As with any new hyped-technology the term 'serverless' is often overloaded with different meanings. Sometimes serverless is oversimplified to mean function-as-a-service(faas). But there is more to it than that. Also, not many people are talking about doing CI/CD with serverless, even though where there is code there still in need of continuous integration and continuous delivery. So I was excited to hear about this talk by Anubhav Mishra on Building a CI/CD Pipeline for Serverless Applications. In the talk Anubhav proposes a new definition for serverless: "" Serverless is a technology pattern that provides services and concepts to minimize operational overhead that comes with managing servers. It is a powerful abstraction when used can result in an increased focus on business value. "" The talk then goes on to demo Jenkins on AWS Fargate (a platform for running containers without managing servers or clusters). The main focus is on increased elasticity/scaling. The advantages of this approach are: No nodes/servers to manage Launch 10,000+ builds/containers in seconds No cost for idle time The real headline is the cost saving, which is 2 orders of magnitude better with serverless. A cost comparison is done based on 1 vCPU & 2GB memory: With Jenkins on Fargate: 100 builds * 5 mins = $0.633/month With Jenkins on EC2 Instances: ~50/month This huge potential cost saving is one of the things that makes serverless incredibly compelling. Not to mention you don’t have to think much upfront about scaling the system. But there are drawbacks with this approach, noted as: Cold starts - slower boot times for clients Large container images (~1G) No root access Ephemeral storage (default) This is an area where Jenkins can continue to evolve to make the most of serverless architectures. I highly recommend you check out the slides for yourself. The best part is that, in the true spirit of open source, Anubvha shared the code here. So you can give it a try yourself and build your own serverless CI/CD pipeline with Jenkins.

The Jenkins Contributor summit is where the current and future contributors of the Jenkins project get together. This summit will be on Monday, September 17th 2018 in San Francisco, just before DevOps World | Jenkins World. The summit brings together community members to learn, meet and help shape the future of Jenkins. In the Jenkins commmunity we value all types and sizes of contributions and love to welcome new participants. Register here. Topics There are plenty of exciting developments happening in the Jenkins community. The summit will feature a 'State of the Project' update including updates from the Jenkins officers. We will also have updates on the 'Big 5' projects in active development: Jenkins Evergreen Jenkins X Configuration as Code Jenkins Pipeline Cloud Native Jenkins Architecture Plus we will feature a Google Summer of Code update, and more! Agenda The agenda is shaping up well and here is the outline so far. 9:00am Kickoff & Welcome with coffee/pastries 10:00am Project Updates 12:00pm Lunch 1.00pm BoF/Unconference 3.00pm Break 3.30pm Ignite Talks 5.00pm Wrap-up 6.00pm Contributor Dinner The BoF (birds-of-a-feather) session will be an opportunity for in depth discussions, hacking or learning more about any of the big 5. Bring your laptop, come prepared with questions and ideas, and be ready for some hacking too if you want. Join in, hear the latest and get involved in any project during the BoF sessions. If you want to share anything there will be an opportunity to do a 5-min ignite talk at the end. Attending is free, and no DevOps World | Jenkins World ticket is needed, but RSVP if you are going to attend to help us plan. See you there!

Last week I participated in the Jenkins & Java 10 Online Hackathon. It was my first Jenkins hackathon and I roped in Jonah Graham to do some pair-programming. The hackathon featured JDK Project Jigsaw committers Mandy Chung and Paul Sandoz, as well as Jenkins creator Kohsuke Kawaguchi. It was a great opportunity for me to learn a lot about Jenkins and Java 10. Why Java 10? With the Java 8 EoL data looming, the focus was on the current available version of Java, Java 10. Java 10 offers some nice new features and APIs, not least improved docker container integration. We learned from Paul of a number of projects with Java 10 migration success stories including Elasticsearch, Kafka & Netty. At the beginning of the hackathon week, the Jenkins Pipeline feature would crash out when using Java 10. This was resolved with a number of fixes including the upgrade of the ASM library. Then it was nice to see things up and running with Java 10. Getting up & running The first steps were to do some exploratory testing using Jenkins with Java 10 via Docker, thanks to Oleg for providing clear instructions. This was boringly straightforward as most things worked and we only found one issue to report. Next to try to get some patches in, we needed to set-up a dev environment. The live session gave us what we needed to set up a plugin or core dev environment. One open question we had was whether Jenkins has semantic versioning and API tools to help identify when you might be breaking backwards compatibility. Overall it was straightforward to get a dev environment up and running. Java 10 New APIs The next step was to find an issue which we could help resolve. Many of the Java 10 issues were related to 'Illegal reflective access' from various plugins or third-party libraries. However after investigating a couple, removing these warnings required a good architectural knowledge of the plugin or core code itself. In the end we decided that messing around with classloaders or attempting to upgrade version of jdom was not one for the newbies. Instead we looked at removing reflection in cases of isAccessible calls. We found the ProcessHandle api very useful and a good replacement for some misuse of reflection, and even better it made the code work on Windows too. Mandy also pointed us to look at the Lookup api as possible alternate to findClass calls. Multi-Release JAR Builds Using new APIs is all well and good but presents a problem when you want to maintain backwards compatibility with Java 8. Hence the need for some sort of multi-jar solution - Nicolas De loof proposed one such solution for multi-release jars with Maven for this case. sun.misc.Signal The Java Signal API is being deprecated, but so far no replacement APIs are available for signal handling. Jenkins makes use of the Signal APIs so a big question for the Jigsaw team was whether this would be replaced going forward. Kohsuke pointed out how it is important for Java to maintain this UNIX like behaviour as it shouldn’t matter to end users that Jenkins is written in Java. It seems these APIs will be replaced in due course, they just aren’t there right now. Collaboration, Collaboration, Collaboration It was great to have the discussions with the Jigsaw team. They reminded us how they need to know the Java use cases out there and how their team uses these to feed into their development process. In turn, the hackathon had Jenkins community members participate, for instance easy-jenkins was up and running with Java 10 by the end of the week. The hackathon had a great feeling of community spirit and was a reminder why collaborations with communities and also between different communities can be powerful and fun for all involved. At the end of the week Jonah and I were both happy that we made our first Jenkins contributions (which were reviewed and merged quickly). Thanks to all who participated and made it highly enjoyable, especially Oleg for great organization. I look forward to the next one!

I’m Tracy Miranda, and I’m really excited to have joined CloudBees this month leading the open source program. CloudBees’ contributions to Jenkins include developing Pipeline and Blue Ocean, staffing the infrastructure team, advocacy and events work, as well as security efforts. My focus is on making sure there is a great relationship between the Jenkins community and CloudBees, which means strong communication, help get traction on things the community wants, and generally working to make Jenkins and the community thrive and stay awesome in an ever-changing tech landscape. Here’s a little background on me: I come from an electronics/EDA background but switched to software early in my career when I first got involved with open source software. I’ve been part of the Eclipse community for around 15 years, definitely from before git was even a thing. I love being involved with all levels: project committer, conference chair, steering committee for working groups and more recently board of directors. On a personal note, I … Live in the UK with my husband and 2 young kids Grew up in Kenya Enjoy playing badminton, love good food & am always first at any buffets I am looking forward to getting to know the Jenkins community well, and really getting a feel for your Jenkins stories, good and bad. Please feel free to let me know: What you love about the Jenkins community & how you are using Jenkins What you’re working on doing with Jenkins What you don’t like and want improved You can find me on the mailing lists or via: Twitter @tracymiranda Email: tmiranda@cloudbees.com IRC: tracymiranda Also I’ll be at the upcoming events: DevOps World - Jenkins World in San Francisco, California and Nice, France so if you plan to attend do come and say hi. The Jenkins community is the real force behind Jenkins. And in turn Jenkins powers so much of the software out there. It is an honour to be joining this wonderful community.