Jenkins User Conference Ringside Report

The last four weeks have been bit crazy for me. I was speaking at Liferay West Coast Symposium, speaking at JavaOne and kicking off the Jenkins User Conference (JUC).

Of these, I was really really looking forward to the JUC kick-off. Namely because I was kicking off the user conference. How often does one get to kick off the first conference of an incredibly exciting piece of technology? When I (and others at CloudBees) talked about this idea in March - we had no idea what the interest level would be. There was uncertainty in the environment. Since then Jenkins has kept marching on - its an animal ;-) (check Kohsuke's slides on Jenkins adoption).

The second reason for the excitement is that I have been associated with Jenkins for quite a while now. Back at Sun - I was the first product manager for Hudson and actually worked on offering it as a product. At that time, I was fairly concerned that in the acquisition to Oracle - this project might be killed so to see the tremendous the project thriving (inspite of Oracle ;-)) was gratifying.

The last reason for the excitement was to see Kohsuke's labor of love get to the next level. You often hear people talking about doing what you love - Kohsuke exemplifies this ideal, so it is great to see something he has been working on from 2004 doing so well.

Ok now to the ringside report...

1.  June: 
1. Hey you know the crazy idea of doing a conference for Jenkins? How about we actually do it? Getting the community to congregate and meet would be really really cool.
2. July
1. Lets do it (from CloudBees perspective aka we will have someone from our team spending time and resources setting this up if the community is interested)...
2. Reach out to the community to see if they are interested. 
1. Ok - the community is interested. (Good - we @CloudBees are not smoking something ;-))
3. Lets do it (from everyone's perspective)
1. When do we do this? How about JavaOne? Jenkins users will be there? Sounds good!
2. Really are we doing this? You know this leaves about 10 weeks to organize this?
4. Form a basic organization committee with CloudBees members and the community. (formed!!)
3. August:
1. Make the idea public. (Couple of community members join the committee). How many do we anticipate? say about 150 people, 1 track and about 10 submissions and perhaps 1-2 sponsors.
1. Holy cow! there is tremendous interest.
2. Open for call for papers... (opened!)
3. We need sponsors to keep this free. (AI - find sponsors)
4. Where are we holding this? (AI find location)
5. Okay seems like we need to have two tracks. Harpreet - please proposed an agenda!
6. Ok. Agenda proposed
7. Abstracts submitted for CloudBees talks.
8. I propose two contests (Bring me bugs and bug bounty) for even greater community participation. (Heidi has the unhappy task of making sure these can be done...) 
9. We should do a newsletter for Jenkins and a survey too. (Lisa gets to it)
10. Alyssa handles all the logistics - finding a place and booking it and food....
4. September: Everything from here on is hazy now
1. We have 7 sponsors (yay!)
2. We have 400+ registrants (yay!)
3. We have 30 submissions (yay!)
1. Review the submissions. Too many good ones. (feel terrible rejecting some :-()
4. I need to do opening keynote introduction (moi?)
5. Build slides...
6. Heidi, Lisa, Alyssa & Andre in complete overdrive mode. (Side note:I should ask them to blog for this month)
5. October
1. Conference is packed! 250 people show up. Lines start at 8am on sunday. 
1. Commonly asked question: Can we have one in Europe as well?
2. Congratulations all around!!
3. Emotional moment for Kohsuke - after all that he has been through this year.
2. Opening to the keynote done (whew...) some people actually liked what I presented...
3. Hit all sessions...Network...
4. Get the videos from the videographers. (in process)
5. Post slides (in process)
6. Do a retrospective or a ringside (marking this as done ;-))
1. Other retrospectives: Sacha, Kohsuke
6. Round of thanks to
1. Kohsuke (for Jenkins :-))
2. CloudBees Marketing: Alyssa, Lisa, Heidi, Harpreet and Andre
3. Sacha for supporting the crazy idea
4. Community Members: Andrew Bayer, Michael Hutterman, Tyler for helping with the organization
5. Community: For making this so successful

Meanwhile my slides are here.

Jenkins User Conference Kick Off

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