Prior to contributing to Jenkins, I was in the group of people who participated in creating Maven2/3. At the time there weren’t many options for CI tooling and we decided to create the Apache Continuum, which was primarily focused on a CI server to build Apache Maven projects. However, some limitations appeared and the team had some other projects to work on by the time Hudson came.

I’ve been using Jenkins for more than 15 years now.

There really isn’t an open source CI server that offers what Jenkins does.

At the Apache Software foundation, while working on different projects with contributors in different timezones, we definitely need to have such CI solutions to help check the committed code and/or the proposed patch. So, I introduced Hudson to Apache and maintained the infrastructure. This has since been taken over by the dedicated Apache infra team, who have upgraded to a more scalable solution based on CloudBees CI rather than the open-source solution I was maintaining and regularly breaking (but this part needs to be kept secret).

There’s not necessarily one thing, I really like Jenkins as a whole.

A very long time ago, I contributed to the Jenkins project, which helped me improve and gain more visibility for both Apache Maven and Jenkins. During the rewrite of Apache Maven 3, the old and widely used Maven-plugin didn’t work anymore. At this time, Apache Maven and Jenkins were both very popular projects and without this enhancement, both might have suffered. So, due to my long time involvement with Apache Maven, I was thrilled to help adopt the new version and make Jenkins the first CI tool to integrate Apache Maven 3. Maybe I shouldn’t have done this, as it now takes some time to get rid of the old Maven-plugin.

Participating in an open-source community is a really good opportunity to improve your technical skills and your resilience as well.