https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/09/jenkins_interview/
Interview The father of popular code pipeline Jenkins has big plans for its future while admitting that it owes its existence to his habit of introducing bugs to code.
After delivering a keynote to a crowd of excitable DevOps fans, creator of the Jenkins project (and now chief technology officer at CloudBees) Kohsuke Kawaguchi took some time to chat about how the pipeline came to be, the plans he has for the future and if he actually gets any time to cut code any more.
Creating Hudson
For the latter point, the answer is not much. Which is probably not a bad thing, since as Kawaguchi confessed to El Reg he had a habit of leaving a trail of bugs. While working as a Java programmer at Sun Microsystems in 2004 he would regularly get phone calls from his colleagues.
"They noticed that suddenly the stuff doesn't even build or whatever. They call[ed] me up on the phone, and they're like: 'OK, I think you touched this the last time. Can you look into it?' Usually, it's because of my fault."
Like any good programmer, Kawaguchi decided to try to solve the problem with code. "I felt, a bit, there were one too many times of those. I felt like I had to write a program."
This program is what would become Hudson, a continuous integration tool, and would go up against the likes of more established frameworks, such as the Java-based CruiseControl.
Competition was, however, not on Kawaguchi's mind. He just wanted to make life easier for his colleagues. With Hudson, he reckoned he'd be taking away build and integration from the list of things programmers have to worry about and observed: "The more we can offload into the rest of the surrounding system, the automation, the computers, the better."
Around him, however, he'd noted that things at Sun had started to go downhill. "A lot of good people had left," he said, but thanks in part to Hudson, incoming staff could be trained up faster. "I just see this as one more way of offloading something from people's minds," he explained, "[a] way of making juniors more productive by learning the programs on things that really matter."