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.

Guest post by Yury V. Zaytsev and Abigail Morrison. To download the PDF file of the journal article mentioned below, click here!

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!

If you are coming to Game Developers Conference in the week of 25th, or if you are local to San Francisco bay area, come join us to the small drink up in the evening of 26th at 21st amendment.

If you are coming, please RSVP so that we know how many to expect, and we can stay connected.