On February 2nd, 2011 the first release of Jenkins, version 1.396, was made available for public consumption. Thus marking a new beginning for many of us who had come to rely on this very versatile piece of software and wanted to see it continue to thrive.

Along with some other bug fixes, the 1.396 release of Jenkins included a very important changelog item:

Fixed a trademark bug that caused a considerable fiasco by renaming to Jenkins

On behalf of the core Jenkins team and the governance board I would like to extend a extremely large Thank You! to all of the plugin developers, bug filers, wiki page editors, book authors and the users who have helped grow Jenkins into the project it is today.

Some of the tidbits from our highlight reel:

• As of this writing there have been 54 releases of Jenkins
• Jenkins now supports writing plugins in Ruby as well as Java (more languages in the process)
• We have 7 high-speed mirrors streaming Jenkins packages to users around the world.
• There are now over 450 different plugins available for Jenkins
• Over 80 donors participated in our end of year fundraising drive
• 5 "Long Term Support" releases have been published by the Jenkins community, offering users a slower moving upgrade target (supported even further by CloudBees' Enterprise Jenkins product)
• Public project governance meetings are held and recorded (almost) every couple of weeks.
• More than 340 individuals contribute on GitHub to the project in some form or another.
• About 750 members of the developers mailing list and around 1700 on the users mailing list

There are many other impressive sounding numbers I could rattle off, but the list is far too long to be interesting.

The project isn't perfect and nor is the software, but we're off to a fine start and I hope you'll join us in making this next year of Jenkins even better than the first.

A slick highlight video from the Jenkins User Conference, 2011 was posted recently which captures some great quotes from a number of the fantastic speakers who participated in the inaugural JUC.

I've embedded the video below, enjoy!

Shortly after the Jenkins project shows up at SCALE10x we will also be at FOSDEM 2012 in Brussels on February 4th and 5th.

If you can make it to Brussels, you definitely should come to FOSDEM. It's one of the largest meetings of open source developers and users on the planet! It's a tremendous opportunity to meet other people in the open source community but also a great learning experience, with over 25 main tracks and plenty of devrooms each hosting their own talks, demos and hackathons. The event is also free!

This year Jenkins will host a stand (table) in the exhibit hall where we will have Jenkins stickers, flyers and maybe even some t-shirts! In addition to the stand, R Tyler Croy will be speaking in the Configuration and Systems Management dev room on the subject of "Open Source Infrastructure - Running the Jenkins project with Puppet and more."

If you're interested in joining in, there's some organizational material on the FOSDEM page on the wiki, with some planning/discussion happening on this mailing list.

I hope to see you there!

Event Date/Time:  Sat, 2012-02-04 12:00

I've tweaked the website so that downloading the Windows and Mac installers will navigate the browser to "thank you/what's next" page. These pages have links to Wiki that educate the users on where/how the installer will run Jenkins.

Hopefully this makes it little easier for new users to get started on Jenkins. I've tested the new mechanism with IE, Safari, and Firefox, but if you notice a problem, please let us know.

Until now, Jenkins plugins written in Java or Groovy could only be built with Maven, using the maven-hpi-plugin to generate a proper manifest and archive which Jenkins can consume. But starting now, you can also use Gradle!

See the wiki for information on how you can use Gradle and the new gradle-jpi-plugin to build, test and release your Java or Groovy Jenkins plugin.

Thanks to the kindness from Gliffy, we can now add diagrams to Wiki pages, in a way that enables collaborative edits.

See more info, including a sample diagram in a Wiki page.

Jenkins community survey result is in, which shows a number of interesting stats for us developers, such as 82% of people saying their Jenkins is mission critical, or the spread of distributed builds, especially compared to my earlier similar usage analytics.

But just as interesting is the free-form answers to questions like "If there was anything you could you change about Jenkins CI, what would it be?", and while the answer is colorful, there are a few common themes that one can easily spot.

One of them is "nothing!", which made me feel good, but another is "UI improvement." And incidentally, Domi has started a thread in the Jenkins-users list about this exact topic a week ago.

The idea is to brainstorm what kind of concrete improvements people would like to see, then run them through some real user experience designers and decide which ones are good ideas and which ones are not.

I find this thread useful — so much so that one of those ideas (always show the "Save" button at the bottom in the config page) is already implemented toward the next release of Jenkins. So if you have some thoughts to share, please chime in on that thread.

Over drinks this evening Kohsuke pointed out that he never saw a blog post about PagerDuty.

If you've never worked in a sysadmin role or in any other position that would require an on-call rotation, then you may have never seen PagerDuty.

In essence the service provides a great series of integration points with Pingdom or Nagios for handling monitoring. As an infrastructure guy (part time), I can honestly say it's a great tool and I'm grateful to PagerDuty for supporting Jenkins with our own account to help manage project infrastructure.

A couple weekends ago I finished setting up Nagios (read-only username/password: jenkins/jenkins) for critical project services which by itself is a good step forward. Combine that with PagerDuty's Nagios integration and a solid on-call rotation, and I'm more confident than I've ever been that Kohsuke or myself could actually take a vacation!

Check them out, and be sure to thank them on Twitter at @PagerDuty for supporting Jenkins!

Our earlier appeal for donation was a drastic boost to our fund-raising drive, (and looking at the twitter reactions, it feels like the Wikipedia parody we put on Jenkins on Jenkins helped spread the words — I guess jokes do work!

And I'm happy to report that we've successfully raised over $12000 as of today. That's more than enough to pay off all the current balance and it should keep the project going for quite a while. I've assembled the donor list in appreciation.

So once again, thanks everyone for their generous support!

Consider yourself cordially invited to join the Jenkins project at the Southern California Linux Expo this January 20th through the 22nd in Los Angeles, CA.

For those who aren't familiar with the expo, often referred to as "SCALE", here's what Wikipedia has to say:

The Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) is an annual Linux, Open-Source, and Free Software conference held in Los Angeles, CA.

SCALE is one of five community run Open-source software events in the United States, as of Spring 2011. SCALE has been held annually since 2002, and is a volunteer-run event. The event features an expo floor with both commercial and .org / non-profit exhibitors, as well as 3 days of seminars on the topic of Linux and Open Source software.

This year, we have been invited to exhibit on the expo floor where we intend on introducing our fellow hackers and non-hackers alike to the joys of continuous integration with Jenkins! Kohsuke and myself will be there demonstrating Jenkins and handing out stickers.

If you're interested in helping with the Jenkins booth, please join this mailing list so we can get things coordinated! If you don't have time to help us man the booth, but will be coming to SCALE anyways (we highly recommend it), stop by and say "hello!"

Just as we did for JavaOne this year, we will also likely host a "CI Dinner" in Los Angeles before the Expo. The details of which will likely be hammered out closer to the event, and likely coordinated on the mailing list.

Hope to see you in LA!

Event Date/Time:  Fri, 2012-01-20 15:00