I had the privilege of being invited to DevOps World | Jenkins World 2019 for presenting the work I did during Google Summer of Code 2019. What follows is a day-by-day summary of an amazing trip to the conference.
Day 0: December 1, 2019
I am an undergraduate student from New Delhi, India and had traveled to Lisbon to attend the conference. I had an early morning flight to Lisbon from Delhi via Istanbul. At the Airport, I met Parichay who had been waiting there from his connecting flight. After flying 8000 km, we reached Lisbon. We took a taxi to the hotel and were greeted there by one of my Google Summer of Code mentors, Oleg. After four months of working with him on my GSoC project, meeting him was an amazing experience. Later that day, after stretching our legs in the hotel, we met Long for an early dinner, who came to the hotel after exploring much of Lisbon.
Day 1: Hackfest, December 2
Next morning, we all met for breakfast where we all got to taste some Pastel de Nata. We then took a cab to the Congress Centre for attending the Jenkins and Jenkins X hackfest. At the Hackfest, I met Mark, Joseph, Kasper, Andrey and other Jenkins contributors. I also met Oleg, this time together with his son and his wife. After our introductions, and a short presentation by Oleg, I started hacking on the Folder Auth plugin and made it possible to delete user sids from roles. The best part of hacking there was to get instant feedback on what I was working on. More and more people kept coming throughout the day. It was great to see so many people working hard to improve Jenkins. At the end, everyone presented what they had achieved that day. Having skipped lunch for some snacks, Oleg and others tried hard to get some pizza delivered without much success. After the Hackfest, everyone was hungry and most attendees including me went looking for nearby restaurants. Since it was early and most restaurants were not open yet, we all decided to have burgers. It was a great learning experience listening to and talking about Jenkins, Elasticsearch, Jira, GitHub and a lot of other things. After that, we took a taxi back to the hotel and I went to bed.
Day 2: Contributor Summit, December 3
We had the Jenkins and Jenkins X contributor summit the next day. Me and Parichay took the bus to the Congress Centre in the morning. After registration, I got my ‘Speaker’ badge and the conference T-shirt. The contributor summit took place in the same hall as the Hackfest, but the seating arrangement was completely different and there were a lot more people. The summit started with everyone introducing themselves. It turned out that there were a lot of people from Munich. There were presentations and talks about all things Jenkins, Jenkins X and the Continuous Delivery Foundation by Kohsuke, Oleg, Joseph, Liam, Olivier, Wadek and others. I had no experience with Jenkins X which made the summit very interesting. After lunch, the talks were over, and everyone was free to join any session discussing various things about Jenkins. I attended the Cloud Native Jenkins and the Configuration-as-Code sessions.
While some of the conference attendees were in the Contributor summit, the others were going through certifications and trainings. At around 5 o’clock in the evening, the summit and the trainings all got over and the expo hall was thrown open. On the entrance, there was a large stack of big DWJW bags. I did not realize why those bags were kept there. Since everyone was taking one, I took one as well. As soon as I went into the hall, I realized that those bags were for collecting swag. I had never seen anything like this where sponsors were just giving away T-shirts, stickers and other stuff. There were snacks and Kohsuke was cutting the extremely tasty 15 years of Jenkins cake. After having the cake, I went on a swag-collecting spree going from one sponsor booth to the other. This was an amazing experience, not only was I able to get cool stuff, I was also able to learn a lot about the software these companies made and how it fits into the DevOps pipeline.
After the conference got over, me, Long and Parichay went to the Lisbon Mariott Hotel for the Eurodog party. After collecting another T-shirt, I went to the nearest restaurant (McDonald’s) with Andrey who I had earlier met at the Hackfest.
Day 3: December 4
This was the first official day of the conference and it began with the keynote. There were over 900 people in the keynote hall. It was amazing to see so many people attending the conference. After the keynote got over, I went to several sessions throughout the day learning about how companies are using Jenkins and implementing DevOps tools.
In the evening, we had the Sonatype Superparty which was a lot of fun. There were neon lights, arcade machines, VR experiences, superheroes and more swag. There was a lot of good food including pizzas and burgers and hot dogs. Superhero inspired desserts were very interesting. I was able to talk to Oleg and Wadek about the security challenges in Jenkins. During the party, I also got a chance to meet the CEO of Cloudbees, Sacha Labourey.
Day 4, December 5
This was the last day of the conference and it began with another keynote. After the keynote, I attended a very interesting talk on how the European Observatory built software for large telescopes using Jenkins. After that, I prepared for my talk on the work I did during Google Summer of Code 2019. I had my presentation in the community booth during the lunch time. Presenting in front of real people was an amazing experience and very different from the ones we had on Zoom chats for our GSoC evaluations. In the evening, I got another chance to present my project at the Jenkins Community Lightning Talks.
After that, the conference came to an end and I went back to the hotel. After relaxing for some time, me, Parichay and Long were invited by Oleg to a dinner at Corinthia Hotel with Kohsuke, Mark and his wife, Tracy, Alyssa, and Liam. Unfortunately, Long couldn’t attend the dinner because he had the flight back earlier that evening. After the amazing dinner, I thanked everyone for such an amazing trip and said goodbye.
DWJW was the best experience I’ve ever had. I was able to learn about a lot of new things and talk to some amazing people. In the end, I would like to especially thank Oleg for helping me throughout and making it possible for me to attend such a wonderful conference. I would like to thank my other mentors Runze Xia and Supun for their support in my Google Summer of Code project. I would like to thank Google for organizing Google Summer of Code, everyone at Jenkins project for sponsoring my travel, and CloudBees for inviting me to the conference.
Looking forward to seeing you all again soon!
