Jenkins: The Definitive Guide

Foreword

Kohsuke Kawaguchi

Creator of the Jenkins project and Architect at CloudBees

Seven years ago, I wrote the first line of code that started this whole project that is now known as Jenkins, and was originally called Hudson. I used to be the guy who broke the build, so I needed a program to catch my mistakes before my colleagues did. It was just a simple tool that did a simple thing. But it rapidly evolved, and now I’d like to think that it’s the most dominant CI server on the market bar none, encompassing a broad plugin ecosystem, commercial distributions, hosted Jenkins-as-a-Service, user groups, meet-ups, trainings, and so on.

As with most of my other projects, this project was open-sourced since its inception. Over its life it critically relied on the help and love of other people, without which the project wouldn’t be in the current state. During this time I’ve also learned a thing or two about running open source projects. From that experience, I think people often overlook that there are many ways to help an open source project, of which writing code is just one of many. There’s spreading words, helping other users, organizing meet-ups, and yes, there’s writing documentation.

In this sense, John is an important part of the Jenkins community, even though he hasn’t contributed code—instead, he makes Jenkins more approachable to new users. For example, he has a popular blog that’s followed by many, where he regularly talks about continuous integration practices and other software ...