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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.

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