Skip to main content

Jenkins User Conference 2014 report

2014 is going to finish in few days. I can say with certainty that the best event I attended this year was the Jenkins User Conference in Berlin (June 25th).


 The Jenkins User Conference 2014 logo

The guys from CloudBees (https://www.cloudbees.com/) did an excellent job in terms of organization and I think they reached the perfection. The location was easy to reach from any place in Berlin and perfect to host an event like this. The halls hosting the 2 talk sessions had big screens, good audio and enough sitting space for all the participants. The food quality was high and the atmosphere was very relaxed and informal, helping people to easily socialize and share ideas. And of course the level of the talks was excellent.
At this event I met for the first time in person Kohsuke Kawaguchi. I already knew that he is a genius, but it was a pleasure to discover that he is also a really wonderful person. 


Meeting Kohsuke during the conference

Here's a quick summary of the most interesting talks I attended during this conference.
Creating High Quality Jenkins Plugins by Christian Langmaan and Robert Hastlowsky (Codecentric). These 2 guys from Codecentric made a talk in the form of a dialogue between them speaking about the meaning of quality in terms of Jenkins plugins development and showing some nice examples of plugins developed at Codecentric. They showed also the solution they implemented in order to safely update plugins on Jenkins servers in different environments (dev, test, stage, production, etc.).



Configuration as Code: The Job DSL Plugin by Daniel Spilker (CoreMedia AG). Daniel is the maintainer of the Job DSL plugin project (https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Job+DSL+Plugin). So he is the best person to explain features, benefits, tips and tricks of this useful plugin. Basically it allows programmatic creation of build jobs using a DSL. Pushing job creation into a script allows to automate, standardize and distribute them across different Jenkins installations.



Jenkins in the Enterprise: Building Resilient CI Infrastructure by Harpreet Singh and Kohsuke Kawaguchi (CloudBees). A presentation of the Jenkins Enterprise solution by CloudBees made by Harpreet and an overview of the future of Jenkins (including a live demo of the Workflow feature (the release 1.0 of this plugin is available since the beginning of this month, according to the original deadline)) made by Kohsuke himself.



Building, Testing & Deploying Android Apps with Jenkins by Christopher Orr (iosphere GmbH).
A nice talk on how to automate the building, testing emulating different devices and deployment of Android applications using Jenkins.  At present time a new automation testing framework for mobile apps (in particular for Android and iOS) called Appium (http://appium.io/) is available. It would be interesting to make a comparison between Appium and the testing frameworks suggested by Christopher in order to understand pros and cons of each approach.


 
Lightweight PaaS for Jenkins CI Environments with Docker by Josef Fuchshuber (QAware GmbH). An introduction to Docker (https://www.docker.com/) followed by a real application of this platform in the deployment of dynamic build slaves for Jenkins and the benefits of this solution.



You can find the slides or the videos of most part of the talks in the CloudBees website.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

jOOQ: code generation in Eclipse

jOOQ allows code generation from a database schema through ANT tasks, Maven and shell command tools. But if you're working with Eclipse it's easier to create a new Run Configuration to perform this operation. First of all you have to write the usual XML configuration file for the code generation starting from the database: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?> <configuration xmlns="http://www.jooq.org/xsd/jooq-codegen-2.0.4.xsd">   <jdbc>     <driver>oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver</driver>     <url>jdbc:oracle:thin:@dbhost:1700:DBSID</url>     <user>DB_FTRS</user>     <password>password</password>   </jdbc>   <generator>     <name>org.jooq.util.DefaultGenerator</name>     <database>       <name>org.jooq.util.oracle.OracleDatabase</name>     ...

Turning Python Scripts into Working Web Apps Quickly with Streamlit

 I just realized that I am using Streamlit since almost one year now, posted about in Twitter or LinkedIn several times, but never wrote a blog post about it before. Communication in Data Science and Machine Learning is the key. Being able to showcase work in progress and share results with the business makes the difference. Verbal and non-verbal communication skills are important. Having some tool that could support you in this kind of conversation with a mixed audience that couldn't have a technical background or would like to hear in terms of results and business value would be of great help. I found that Streamlit fits well this scenario. Streamlit is an Open Source (Apache License 2.0) Python framework that turns data or ML scripts into shareable web apps in minutes (no kidding). Python only: no front‑end experience required. To start with Streamlit, just install it through pip (it is available in Anaconda too): pip install streamlit and you are ready to execute the working de...

TagUI: an Excellent Open Source Option for RPA - Introduction

 Photo by Dinu J Nair on Unsplash Today I want to introduce  TagUI , an RPA (Robotic Process Automation) Open Source tool I am using to automate test scenarios for web applications. It is developed and maintained by the AI Singapore national programme. It allows writing flows to automate repetitive tasks, such as regression testing of web applications. Flows are written in natural language : English and other 20 languages are currently supported. Works on Windows, Linux and macOS. The TagUI official documentation can be found  here . The tool doesn't require installation: just go the official GitHub repository and download the archive for your specific OS (ZIP for Windows, tar.gz for Linux or macOS). After the download is completed, unpack its content in the local hard drive. The executable to use is named  tagui  (.cmd in Windows, .sh for other OS) and it is located into the  <destination_folder>/tagui/src  directory. In order to ...