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On January 20, the first San Francisco JAM (Jenkins Area Meetup) of the new year was held at Mesosphere ’s offices. We had two speakers - myself, and Roger Ignazio, an infrastructure automation engineer at Mesosphere. Around forty people attended and enjoyed the food and drinks Mesosphere provided for us. Links to the talks are below: Elastic Jenkins with Mesos and DCOS, by Roger Ignazio Who is Jenkins?, by Andrew Bayer More JAMs will be happening in the coming months - for example, the first Los Angeles JAM is tentatively planned for early March, 2016! You can always find out the latest on JAMs around the world at the Jenkins Area Meetup page.

Historically January has always been a very big month for the Jenkins community. Between FOSDEM Southern California Linux Expo (also known as SCaLE) we seem to hand out more stickers during the last week in January than any other week of the year. This year’s SCaLE 14X conference finally outgrew the LAX Hilton in Los Angeles, where it had been hosted in years past, and moved over to the Pasadena Convention Center in Pasadena California. While the organizers of the conference expanded their scope, so did the Jenkins project! In addition to our normal Jenkins stickers, we also had some special edition stickers with special logos to give away this year, namely: Angry Jenkins General Jenkins Superhero Jenkins "Cute" Jenkins Ninja Jenkins To accompany the stickers we also had both blue Jenkins and red "Angry Jenkins" pins. Savvy Jenkins users might recognize "Angry Jenkins" from the Jenkins server’s internal 500 page; fortunately however very few people that came by the booth to say 'hello' were familiar with Angry Jenkins. Talking Points Aside from talking about the cool stickers and pins, we spent the vast majority of time talking about Jenkins to two groups of people: those who never had actually used Jenkins, even if they had heard of it users who knew plenty about Jenkins but hadn’t actually heard about some of the Jenkins 2.0 Proposals. Anecdotally, it seemed like most of the people that I talked to about "Jenkins 2.0" were pretty excited about the Jenkinsfile idea and starting to define their build processes and delivery pipelines as code in their source repositories. Perhaps more importantly though, we spoke with many users about where Jenkins is causing them pain or frustration. Speaking directly with users at events like SCaLE or Jenkins Area Meetups is always fun, having a high-bandwidth conversation about what we can do better and/or offering solutions/workarounds to hopefully relieve some pain-points. In one such case, a contributor approached me and complained that he had emailed the developers' mailing list and frustratingly never actually received a response. Comically enough, neither of us were able to find the email he had sent the mailing list (whoops!) but because of the dynamic nature of booth-duty at SCaLE, we got him squared away with a repository to contribute a Jenkins Charm for the Juju configuration management tool. Jammin' Among the booth-duty highlights was meeting a few folks who were interested on starting a southern California Jenkins meetup. Over the days following the conference, and a brief discussion on the jenkinsci-jam@ mailing list, and the Los Angeles Jenkins Area Meetup was born! I’m looking forward to the meetup growing over the next couple months and helping build a stronger local Jenkins community in Southern Califonia for the other 51 weeks a year that SCaLE isn’t happening. SCaLE is one of my more favorite open source conferences, the positive community in attendance, a kid-friendly atmosphere ("Game Night" was a blast) and the broad spectrum of sessions available make it a great way to spent the weekend in southern California. We hope to see you there again next year!

For the past few years, a couple members of the Jenkins project have made the trip to Los Angeles for the Southern California Linux Expo. Despite the name it’s a fairly broad open source technology conference and since it is hosted prior to FOSDEM, it’s also a good conference to get us in the open source mood after the holiday break. Unlike previous years, when SCaLE was hosted at the LAX Hilton, this year it has grown and moved to the Pasadena Convention Center. There, as with previous years, we’ll have a table in the expo hall with plenty of stickers and perhaps some other forms of swag available for devotees to collect. The expo hall will be open January 23rd and January 24th, and a few Jenkins contributors will be there to ask questions to, talk about CI/CD and hand out stickers. Additionally, I have a presentation on Saturday, January 23rd titled " Continuous Delivery of Infrastructure with Jenkins" Talk abstract "" In this talk we will review continuous delivery concepts and put them into practice by building a continuous delivery pipeline with Jenkins to test, stage and deploy to infrastructure code to production. Reducing the effort, error rate and time it takes to deploy a configuration to change to production means less time fighting fires and more time doing what you want. "" During the talk I’ll be highlighting some of the positive, and negative, patterns used by the Jenkins infrastructure team to manage, test and deliver the Jenkins project’s own infrastructure. Sort of a followup from my 2014 PuppetConf talk about migrating Jenkins infrastructure from controllerless Puppet to a Puppet Enterprise oriented installation. If you’re in the LA area, we hope to see you for SCaLE 14X in Pasadena!

On December 15, the Toulouse JAM was co-hosted with the Toulouse JUG and Toulouse DevOps. Indeed it made sense since Jenkins is written in Java, makes use of Groovy code in many places (system groovy script, job dsl, workflow…​), and it also made sense to co-organize with the local DevOps community since Jenkins is also a great tool to enable Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and automation in general. There were 103 RSVPs, with 80 to 90 people in attendance. There were 3 talks planned for the evening: Job DSL Intro [fr], by Ghislain Mahieux Video recording Workflow plugin [fr], by Michaël Pailloncy (co-maintainer of the Build Trigger Badge plugin) Video recording Feedback on almost 10 years of CI and what’s upcoming [fr], demo with Jenkins build scaling with Docker Swarm, by Baptiste Mathus Video recording Photos can be found here

Thank you to Netflix for sponsoring the yummy burrito bar and offered up their brand new auditorium to host Jenkins Developers and Users Meetup group on Dec 16. We had 96 RSVPs which was impressive. Our speaker for the evening was Akshay Dayal, Software Engineer at Google. Akshay’s session was about Scaling Jenkins - how and why Google decided to scale their existing Jenkins cluster (OSS) to meet their security/availability and failover requirements and how heavy automation played an important role in this effort. The second talk was about how Google worked with Jenkins to read config data externally. Slides are listed below. The video will be posted on the meetup page) once it becomes available. Slides for the talks are linked below: Scaling Jenkins External Project Check out where Jenkins Area Meetups (JAMs) are located in the world. Don’t see a JAM in your area? why not start your own, here’s how.

Although December is a short month due to the holidays, there has been a good amount of local Jenkins activities that took place regardless of holiday obligations. Today and tomorrow I will be doing a series of posts to summarize December JAM World Tour. Special thanks to the JAM organizers and co-organizers who made it all happen in these cities: Lima, Peru St.Petersburg, Russia Toulouse, France Bay Area, CA On December 9 Lima JAM hosted their first Jenkins meetup in Lima, Peru. There were attendance from various roles of DevOps: Dev, QA, and Ops. There was also a good mixture of different levels of Jenkins users, some were new and just starting to use Jenkins while others had extensive Jenkins experience. The group has been invited by Docker and Ansible meetup organizers for a joint event in January to showcase technologies from Jenkins, Docker, and Ansible. Congrats to Lima JAM group. Slides from the meetup can be found here. Additional shared resources used in the Lima JAM can be found here. Check out where Jenkins Area Meetups (JAMs) are located in the world. Don’t see a JAM in your area? why not start your own, here’s how.

The first Jenkins meetup in Saint Petersburg, Russia took place on December 9th. The event has been organized with the help from Yandex and CloudBees. In total there were about 80 attendees at the meetup. In addition to meetup.com the event has been promoted by Yandex so we quickly reached capacity limit. There were 3 talks conducted, speakers from Yandex, ZeroTurnaround and CloudBees. We discussed the current open-source project state, ongoing activities in the community, Jenkins-powered CD case studies from ZeroTurnaround and Jenkins plugin development approaches. Intro slides [ru] Who is Mr. Jenkins? Current State, common usage issues and trends in the community [ru], by Oleg Nenashev - [ video ] English version Jenkins beyond CI. ZeroTurnaround’s experience [en], by Sergei Egorov - [ video ] When to write your own plugin and when not to [ru], by Kirill Merkushev - [ video ] Q&A Session [ru], all speakers - [ video ] Check out where Jenkins Area Meetups (JAMs) are located in the world. Don’t see a JAM in your area? Why not start your own, here’s how.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, we’re planning a "Contributor Summit" on February 1st, after FOSDEM 2016 (January 30th/31st), to focus on Jenkins 2.0. Since many of us are already planning, the Monday following the event turned out to be the ideal time to discuss 2.0. If you’re not already familiar with some of the key proposals that were put forth, you can review them in the Jenkins 2.0 proposals summery page. We’ve hosted one or two Contributor Summits in the past, and they’re usually a day-long event where we try to gather a number of Jenkins core/plugin developers and active/power users to have detailed discussions around the theme of the summit. For this "Jenkins 2.0 Contributor Summit" we do not have a complete agenda yet, but we will post that to the Meetup event once it is fully prepared in the next couple weeks. Suffice it to say, we’ll be discussing a lot! Venue and RSVP The Contributor Summit will be hosted in a CloudBees office at: Rue des Colonies, 11, Brussels, Belgium. If you’re already planning on attending FOSDEM, the office is near Grand Place and Cafe Delerium (where the Friday beer event is hosted). The venue is of limited size, so if you’re planning to join us, please RSVP to the Meetup event as soon as you’re certain you will be able to attend. If you find yourself unable to attend, please remove yourself from the list to ensure that we can fit as many active contributors into the office as possible!