Jenkins GSoC

On behalf of the Jenkins GSoC org team, I am happy to announce that the Jenkins project has been accepted to Google Summer of Code 2019. This year we invite students and mentors to join the Jenkins community and work together on enhancing the Jenkins ecosystem.

Just to provide some numbers, this is the biggest GSoC ever, 206 organizations will participate in GSoC this year. And it will be hopefully the biggest year for Jenkins as well. We have 25 project ideas and more than 30 potential mentors (and counting!). It is already more than in 2016 and 2018 combined. There are many plugins, SIGs and sub-projects which have already joined GSoC this year. And we have already received messages and first contributions from dozens of students, yey!

What’s next? GSoC is officially announced, and please expect more students to contact projects in our Gitter channels and mailing lists. Many communications will also happen in SIG and sub-project channels. We will be working hard in order to help students to find interesting projects, to explore the area, and to prepare their project proposals before the deadline on April 9th. Then we will process the applications, select projects and assign mentor teams.

All information about the Jenkins GSoC is available on its sub-project page.

I am a student. How do I apply?

See the Information for students page for full application guidelines.

We encourage interested students to reach out to the Jenkins community early and to start exploring project ideas. All project ideas have chats and mailing lists referenced on their pages. We will be also organizing office hours for students, and you can use these meetings to meet org admins and mentors and to ask questions. Also, join our Gitter channel and the mailing list to receive information about such incoming events in the project.

The application period starts on March 25th, but you can prepare now! Use the time before the application period to discuss and improve your project proposals. We also recommend that you become familiar with Jenkins and start exploring your proposal areas. Project ideas include quick-start guidelines and reference newbie-friendly issues which may help with initial study. If you do not see anything interesting, you can propose your own project idea or check out ideas proposed by other organizations participating in GSoC.

I want to be a mentor. Is it too late?

It’s not! We are looking for more project ideas and for Jenkins contributors/users who are passionate about Jenkins and want to mentor students. No hardcore experience required, mentors can study the project internals together with students and technical advisors. We are especially interested in ideas beyond the Java stack, and in ideas focusing new technologies and areas (e.g. Kubernetes, IoT, Python, Go, whatever).

You can either propose a new project idea or join an existing one. See the Call for Mentors post and Information for mentors for details. If you want to propose a new project, please do so by March 11th so that students have time to explore them and to prepare their proposals.

This year mentorship does NOT require strong expertise in Jenkins development. The objective is to guide students and to get involved into the Jenkins community. GSoC org admins will help to find advisers if special expertise is required.

Important dates

  • Mar 11 - deadline for new GSoC project idea proposals

  • Apr 09 - deadline for student applications

  • May 06 - accepted projects announced, teams start community bonding and coding

  • Aug 26 - coding period ends

  • Sep 03 - Results announced

See the GSoC Timeline for more info. In the Jenkins project we will also organize special events during and after GSoC (e.g. at Jenkins world).

About the Author
Oleg Nenashev

Jenkins core maintainer and board member, open source software and open hardware advocate, TOC chair in the Continuous Delivery Foundation. Oleg started using Hudson for Hardware/Embedded projects in 2008 and became an active Jenkins contributor in 2012. Nowadays he maintains [Jenkinsfile Runner](https://github.com/jenkinsci/jenkinsfile-runner/), contributes to several Jenkins SIGs and outreach programs (Google Summer of Code, Hacktoberfest) and organizes Jenkins meetups in Switzerland and Russia. Oleg works on open source programs and [Keptn](https://keptn.sh/) at the [Dynatrace](https://dynatrace.com), Open Source Program Office.