Recent Blog Posts

While we are gearing up for FOSDEM 2016 early next year in Brussels, I wanted to remind the Jenkins community about our Travel Grant Program. We’re a little late on mentioning it, but the board has allocated the money to help Jenkins contributors travel to Brussels to participate in FOSDEM and the Jenkins Contributor Summit which we will be hosting the day after, Feb 1st, which we’ll discuss more in a later blog post. For the FOSDEM Travel Grant Program, we are able to cover up to $500 (USD) in expenses to help community members participate in FOSDEM. If you’re interested, please read the description of the program below. Please note that some of the details of the program are different from the linked grant program page Regardless we hope to see you all at FOSDEM on January 30th and 31st, 2016, in Brussels! Eligibility All community members are eligible for support unless they’ve received a travel grant within the last year (based on the event’s date). However, as we have very limited funds to support this program, we’ll prefer applications by active contributors to the Jenkins project. If you have other possible funding sources, please look to them first. This will allow more people to attend a Jenkins community event. Application The application process for FOSDEM, due to our poor timing, deviates from the traditional Travel Grant Program. To apply for a travel grant, send an email with the following information to the Governance Board at jenkinsci-board@googlegroups.com before January 6th. Your name The event you’d like to attend The expected cost of travel (airfare, hotel, conference fees, etc.) A description of your contributions to the Jenkins project, such as: Plugins you developed Pull requests you authored Documentation you wrote Public presentations on Jenkins-related topics Why should we sponsor your trip? Applicants Responsibilities If you’ve been selected for a travel grant, we’ll expect you to: Be available for a blog post about this program before the event. Help out at the Jenkins stand at FOSDEM If your schedule permits, we’d love to see you at the Jenkins 2.0 Contributor Summit the day after FOSDEM. It should go without saying that we expect all Jenkins contributors representing the project at an event such as FOSDEM to act in a respectful and constructive manner. As we have not yet formally adopted our own Code of Conduct, we recommend reviewing the FOSDEM Code of Conduct. After the trip, please submit a travel report to jenkinsci-dev@googlegroups.com mailing list. This report should include the following: What you accomplished at the event What you learned at the event Contacts you made Other useful information We also expect you to submit your receipts via email to the person mentioned in the travel grant confirmation for review. We will reimburse actually incurred costs up to the 500 USD limit.

Next week in the US we have a national holiday where, generally speaking, lots of turkey gets converted into left-over turkey sandwiches. For many software developers the Thanksgiving holiday also represents a lull in project schedules, freeing up some time to hack on pet projects or even contribute to open source projects. Taking a cue from the Adopt a Plugin program that Daniel wrote about earlier this month, we thought it would be fun to organize a "virtual hackathon" to coincide with that gap in project schedules. Thus Hacksgiving 2015 was created! We’ll be hosting Hacksgiving Nov 23rd and Nov 24 from 7:00PST - 15:00PST (10:00EST - 18:00EST) and would love for you to join! ( RSVP here) You don’t need to know Java to help! We will have documentation and design hacking going on as well. We have a few goals for Hacksgiving: Introduce new contributors to the process of writing code and/or documentation ( documentation hacking details here). Find some plugins which are up for adoption new maintainers. Clean up or merge some existing plugins which need some care ( listed here). === Sessions to note Here are some of the sessions scheduled that will be hosted by members of community that may interest you: Day One 7:00PST/10:00EST ( 15-30min) - rtyler will host a welcome and introduction to contribution to the Jenkins project (walking through our contributors guide) 10:00PST/13:00EST ( 60min) - schristou will host a workshop titled "Introduction to plugin development for Jenkins" Day Two 10:00PST/13:00EST ( 60min) - abayer will be hosting a "Plugin Developer Open Q&A" session, so bring your questions! Hacksgiving is very unconference structured right now, so if you’re interested in hosting a session please let us know in the #jenkins-community channel or by signing up for a session on the schedule How to participate Since this is a virtual hackathon, we’ll be congregating and chatting in a couple of ways: On the #jenkins IRC channel as per usual We’ll be hosting sessions and tutorials via Google Hangouts, see the " hacker hangout * section on the wiki page up to date details Via the #hacksgiving hashtag on Twitter You can also RSVP on our meetup page! We hope you can join in the festivities!

It is great to see the pick up of local activities through hosted JAMs. In October, the Jenkins community hosted Atlanta JAM and Bay Area JAM. Many thanks to our sponsors: Ericsson, CloudBees, Blazemeter, NetRoadShow. Here’s a summary of what was discussed: Atlanta JAM - Jenkins workflow and Docker to reduce friction in DevOps efforts. Bay Area JAM- Performance testing strategies, incorporating performance tests into Jenkins workflows and the metrics that matter most for troubleshooting and diagnosing issues. A look forward to November and December: Hacksgiving Barcelona, Spain JAM Toulouse,France JAM As usual, if you’re interested in becoming an organizer or sponsor, here’s how to get started. If you’ve heard of a great Jenkins talk out there, shoot us an email with speaker info to jenkinsci-jam@googlegroups.com so we can invite him/her to our next meetups.

+ image:https://jenkins-ci.org/sites/default/files/images/Seville-JAM_logo_1024px_0.png[image] + + + There’s been some active discussions and planning around Jenkins Area Meetups (JAMs) specifically in the following cities: Rennes, France Seville, Spain Seattle, Washington Barcelona,Spain Raleigh, North Carolina Atlanta, Georgia + + I wanted to gauge Jenkins interests in these cities, so let us know at jenkinsci-jam@googlegroups.com if you live in one of these areas, and if you would be interested in becoming a member or be involved in JAM one way or another! + + Of course, if the city you live in currently does not have a JAM and you’re interested in paying it forward, here’s HOW YOU can become a JAM organizer.

+ image:https://jenkins-ci.org/sites/default/files/images/Screen%20Shot%202015-09-30%20at%202.15.54%20PM_0.png[image,width=320] + + + Last week, the first Jenkins Area Meetup (JAM) took place in San Jose, CA on Wednesday, Sept 23. What a way to kick off the first JAM other than to have Docker, John Willis as our guest speaker. John talked about immutable infrastructure and its benefits and role of containers. + + Kohsuke discussed Jenkins Workflow, the motivation behind the same and latest features of Jenkins Workflow like multi branch support followed by docker use cases. The highlight of the meetup was definitely Kohsuke breaking the news about Jenkins 2.0 and his vision and motivation behind it. + + The next Bay Area JAM is slated for Oct 21. Be sure to check HERE for the agenda. We’d love to have you join us if you’re in the area. If you’re interested in speaking, or become a food & bev, venue, or recording sponsor please send email to the organizer or events@lists.jenkins-ci.org.

A few years ago, the Jenkins community announced the Jenkins CIA program - the Continuous Integration Ambassador initiative to spread the word of Jenkins. As of recently, there hasn’t been as much activity, so this program needs to be revived! + + There are over 120,000 active Jenkins installations now and that number just keeps climbing and climbing. It’s important to bring all of us together through big events like the Jenkins User Conference, but not everyone can get there. That is why Meetups and smaller Jenkins events are crucial. + + To support this effort, CloudBees has announced that they will be sponsoring the kickoff of the CIA revival/https://jenkins-ci.org/content/bay-area-jenkins-area-meet-looking-you[JAM] to help the Jenkins community host these Meetups! + + To kick this off, the first Jenkins Area Meetup (JAM) is in the San Jose CloudBees office on Sept 23. We are shooting to have a JAM everything 3rd Wednesday of every month to consistently bring the community together.

+ 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.

+ _ + Guest post by Yury V. Zaytsev and Abigail Morrison. To download the PDF file of the journal article mentioned below, https://www.frontiersin.org/Neuroinformatics/10.3389/fninf.2012.00031/abstract[click here]!_ + + + image:https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/96/Gray739.png/250px-Gray739.png[image] + + + + As recently exemplified by several reports on this blog, automation tools such as continuous integration servers, that help to defuse the exploding complexity of software under the ever-increasing pressure to deliver, are steadily gaining well-deserved mindshare in the industry. + + + However, it is not just developers of enterprise software who need solutions to the complexity problem. Scientists are arguably even worse off: most of them are not trained as software engineers, yet, in the last decades, creating custom software has become an integral part of virtually any research activity, be it data analysis, simulation or experiments. Frequently, there is a great emphasis on numerical accuracy and reproducibility of results, which requires extensive testing. As a coup de grâce, most publicly funded research projects are running on tight budgets, excluding the possibility of hiring professional contractors to outsource required software development work. + + + Enter Jenkins the Butler! + + + Back in 2011, Yury V. Zaytsev, a doctoral candidate now working at Jülich Research Center, Germany was supported by a Google Summer of Code stipend to design a continuous integration infrastructure for http://www.nest-initiative.org[NEST], a spiking neuronal network simulator for neuroscientific research released under the GPL license. An overwhelmingly positive experience with this new setup motivated him to write up https://www.frontiersin.org/Neuroinformatics/10.3389/fninf.2012.00031/abstract[a case study], which was recently published in "Frontiers in Neuroinformatics", an open access scientific journal. + + + "The new CI system boosts our productivity, because it helps us find and fix breakages very quickly, even when they only occur for obscure combinations of configuration options. Automated integration testing is a major breakthrough for NEST, as it ensures that developing new features does not come at the cost of reliability or accuracy" - said Markus Diesmann, director of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-6) at the Jülich Research Center, Germany and NEST Initiative board member. + + + We hope that through a peer-reviewed publication in a prominent scientific journal we will be able to reach the scientific community more efficiently, as compared to the materials targeting professional software developers. However, we likewise believe that our case study might be of interest to the readers of this blog, especially those who are still only considering implementing continuous integration. + + + Lastly, we would like to thank all developers and users of Jenkins whose contributions throughout the years made it the versatile and robust continuous integration server it is today!