I was doing C and Visual Basic at work, along with a little bit of embedded C development. I transitioned to C# from C/VB in the application I was supporting, and started to pick up more responsibility in the build and deployment area of my group. I started using Jenkins to do the build/deployment and moved my group in a much more agile direction, using continuous integration for our testing. This led to me looking at the Email Extension plugin and trying to understand why it wasn’t able to do what I wanted it to do. I started submitting patches and fixing issues in the plugin to help me in my work. The rest, as they say, is history!

I have been using Jenkins for the last 15 years.

Jenkins was, and still is, the best at what it does.

Jenkins has helped solve lots of problems! I had to build and deploy around 50 embedded firmware binaries, several desktop applications, and more. Jenkins has helped me streamline this and make solutions that are easy to use, easy to maintain, and powerful!

I like to help people resolve issues on the Community channels (community.jenkins.io and Matrix). Due to the global reach of Jenkins and the Community channels, we are able to communicate easily and help each other. Interacting with people all over the world, learning from them, and helping them solve issues is part of the magical open-source experience.

I have previously maintained and currently maintain plugins that are used by many people. It feels good to make an impact by working on something that so many people use.

Just find something that you like (or I guess don’t like and want to improve) and go for it. There are plenty of issues in Jira and GitHub that need someone to look at them!