Jenkins is the first open-source project I contributed to with a community. Before that, I had submitted some small contributions on homemade Maven plugins.

Now, I’m contributing to different tools and technologies like Helm charts (Bitnami external DNS) and Ansible collections (Prometheus collection). Recently I’ve added some features to OpenRewrite, which is also used by the Jenkins project.

I’ve been using Jenkins for quite a long time. I think the first time I used Jenkins was around 2009 before it was even called Jenkins. My first contribution to Jenkins occurred in 2018.

I gravitated towards Jenkins for its cost, flexibility, and ability to circumvent on-premises infrastructure constraints. Since Jenkins is an open-source project, it can be easily extended via plugins.

Jenkins has helped me with automation and employing continuous integration despite on-premises environment limitations.

The community of course! Jenkins also has a massive plugin ecosystem that provides further customization and abilities. I’m also particularly intrigued by cloud-native deployment of Jenkins, like external storage or Jenkinsfile runner.

There isn’t one contribution in particular, but over the last two years I’ve adopted about 30 previously abandoned plugins. I’ve refreshed them and fixed any issues, including security, and I now maintain them regularly. However, if I choose the contribution I’m the most proud of, it is the recent additions of OpenCover and NUnit parser into the Coverage plugin.

Start with small contributions. Don’t expect to be a core maintainer immediately. Start with documentation or other low-impact features.

Documenting bugs and making sure they can be easily reproduced is a great way to contribute to Jenkins and other open-source projects in general. This helps a lot when regular maintainers are troubleshooting issues!