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!
Originally posted on Jenkins Blog
Author: abhyudayasharma