Historically January has always been a very big month for the Jenkins community. Between FOSDEMSouthern 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 aJenkins 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 thejenkinsci-jam@ mailing list, and theLos 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!