Your favorite Butler will visit Israel on June 6 for the Jenkins User Conference Israel. More than 200 people have already registered to hobnob with other Jenkins users and eat like kings.

The agenda is up here. You’ll find a great list of speakers from Israel, Europe and the US to compliment a plethora of treats. There will be an ice cream break, fruits break, beer break and special chef lunch.

Volume 4 of Continuous Information came out last night. It contains insights and highlights from founder Kohsuke, the latest growth stats, upcoming event info, Jenkins resources, and more.

Highlights:

• Jenkins has nearly 20,000 more active installations than it had last June, up from 43,500 to more than 61,000
• Nearly 100 plugins have been added since late last Fall when we did the last Jenkins survey. Now there are more than 730 plugins
• Bay Area JUC (Oct 23), JUC Israel (Jun 6) and several other Jenkins events around the world have open registration
• Latest, greatest Jenkins improvements include a new LTS based on 1.509, more context menu improvements, and master/slave data transfer performance improvement
• There's also a Security advisory out recommending upgrade to at least 1.502
• A plethora of Jenkins and Continuous Delivery resources

With more than 600 plugins, Jenkins has a vibrant community and we're dependent on YOU to keep it that way. Here are 3 ways you can give back to the community to ensure that everyone benefits and Jenkins keeps growing...

Giving it back to the community #1: vendor+community=win

Jenkins is becoming ubiquitous enough that tool vendors and service providers often find their users asking them to provide Jenkins plugins. The challenge for these companies is that they don’t necessarily possess the necessary Jenkins expertise to do one.

Here at the Jenkins project, what we are trying to do is to work with these people to deliver a plugin. It gets the job done a whole lot more quickly if the vendor brings in their expertise on their tool/services and we bring in our expertise on Jenkins plugin development.

For example, we recently worked with SOASTA to help them open-source the plugin they developed in house, then help them add a whole bunch of new functionalities. By open-sourcing a plugin in the Jenkins project, vendors win as the community helps fix bugs and improve plugins. The Jenkins project wins by building relationship with vendors. And finally the users win by having more integrations.

This year, the West Coast Jenkins User Conference will be in Palo Alto rather than San Francisco. If you’re nearby – or even if you’re not – join Kohsuke and other fellow developers for a solid day of Jenkins.

• The Date: Wednesday, October 23, 2013
• The Venue: Palo Alto Jewish Community Center
• Details
• Register

The Call for Papers is open until June 9 (scroll to bottom of page for form).

It's been a while we had a hackathon in Germany. Let's get together, get some coding done, and get to know fellow Jenkins developers! The date is June 15th Saturday.

TNG Technology Consulting, where Stefan Wolf (dependency graph viewer plugin, etc) works, will be hosting us (thanks!)

We'll try to arrange some themes or agenda, based on who's coming and how many of us will be there. For example,

• If there are many people who have never done a plugin development, we can do a plugin development tutorial.
• If we see a concentration of devs in a specific area of Jenkins (say mobile), we can try some focused development in a specific area.
• If you have things you need from the core to do what you want, this is the chance to get that implemented on the spot!
• If you want to see a certain development happen in Jenkins but don't know how, please make a pitch to us in the form of presentations (short or long) would be welcome

Finally, assuming there's interest, we'll head out somewhere for a dinner afterward.