SheCodeAfrica is a non-profit organization focused on celebrating and empowering young girls and women in technology across Africa. They provide resources and events that help women grow and achieve their personal and career goals. Their mentoring programs provide help and guidance as participants learn and grow in their careers.
This year, SheCodeAfrica is organizing the SheCodeAfrica Contributhon. Contributhon is a boot camp where African women are paid to work with open source organizations on selected projects with dedicated mentors. This program aims to create a more diverse, inclusive, and innovative culture within the African open source ecosystem by matching African women in technology with sponsor and mentor open source organizations.
Jenkins in SheCodeAfrica Contributhon
The Jenkins project has been accepted as a Contributhon mentoring organization. Our project idea will introduce participants to Jenkins and plugin development as they create Pipeline examples and create Pipeline help for Jenkins Pipeline plugins. Participants will learn more about Jenkins Pipeline and will submit plugin pull requests with examples and online help.
The Jenkins Pipeline Steps Reference and Pipeline online help often receive feedback that more examples are needed, that step return values need to be described, and that arguments need more description of their purpose, allowed values, and expected results. Most plugin maintainers do not provide detailed documentation of the pipeline steps, or the arguments to those pipeline steps. This project will improve the documentation of pipeline steps and their arguments while introducing Jenkins Pipeline, Jenkins plugin development, Jenkins documentation as code, and the concepts of GitHub forks and pull requests.
We’ve identified development tasks that up to three Contributhon participants will complete during April. The tasks will introduce the participants to Jenkins plugin development. They will experiment with plugin changes in Jenkins and submit pull requests to provide Pipeline examples and help. They will meet twice a week with Jenkins mentors, Kristin Whetstone, Mark Waite, and Meg McRoberts to review their progress, provide coaching, and help with issues.
Data driven choices
We’ve been collecting Jenkins documentation feedback since 2017. Now we’re using that feedback to prioritize the plugins to improve as part of this project. The top 10 Pipeline plugins that have received the most feedback are:
What about my plugin?
If you are a plugin maintainer and would like help to add examples and online help for the Pipeline steps in your plugin, send email to the Jenkins Documentation mailing list. We’ll consider including additional plugins as we better understand the development pace for SheCodeAfrica participants.