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Kohsuke Kawaguchi (@kohsukekawa) is the creator of Jenkins, a continuous integration tool he wrote a number of years ago as a way to verify that he checked in his files and didn’t affect his multi-developer build. It is safe to say that Kohsuke wasn’t the only one with that problem. A huge hit, the Jenkins CI server, which at the time was known as Hudson, reached a wide adoption level, with people installing it officially and even under their desktops in many IT development shops.
Kohsuke discusses the challenges in developing a tool like Jenkins, which changed names after the new owner of Sun, Oracle, decided that it owned the trademark to the Hudson product name. Oracle has contributed Hudson to the Eclipse foundation, and Kohsuke has continued developing Jenkins, sticking to a build per week strategy, conducting all team meetings in an open IRC forum, as well as documenting project status on their website, jenkins-ci.org.
We talk about current efforts, including supporting the plug-in developer community, writing plugins in Ruby, the CloudBees projects he’s working on, and more. Thanks again to Kohsuke and Lisa Wells, who lined up the interview.
Show Notes
- The Jenkins Project web site – http://jenkins-ci.org
- CloudBees, cloud development, CI, and hosting – http://cloudbees.com
- Testing Jenkins, from Jenkins – the CI site for Jenkins itself and other Jenkins related projects: http://ci.jenkins-ci.org
- Writing Jenkins plugins – https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Plugin+tutorial
- Writing Jenkins plugins, this time in Ruby! https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Jenkins+plugin+development+in+Ruby
- Kohsuke’s web site – http://kohsuke.org
- Jenkins official twitter username: @jenkinsci