Hacktoberfest is an annual month-long event that celebrates open source by giving back to the community. In October 2021, CloudBees ran our first company-wide Hacktoberfest initiative. Hacktoberfest at CloudBees 2021 was an employee-led, grassroots initiative to bring our Hive together to learn new skills, network, collaborate, and strengthen our relationships by contributing to the Jenkins project as a team. We had a wide mix of experts and first-time contributors who made remarkable contributions across various topics, from documentation and translations all the way to Jenkins infrastructure and security improvements. But more importantly, we had cross-departmental collaboration. People from marketing, support, design, and documentation made contributions and gave their input. Even leadership got involved and gave us their strong support. This project started from the bottom up and we got support and encouragement from the top down, rather than obstacles.
We wanted to share with the world what CloudBees employees were able to achieve in just one month. We believe in empowering people to do great things—and giving credit where credit is due. So, what did CloudBees employees accomplish during Hacktoberfest 2021?
As mentioned before, we worked on various larger topics that the following champions led brilliantly:
Translations—led by Angélique Jard: More than 10 French and Spanish translations were submitted to Jenkins Core and various plugins from six different contributors. Angélique also fostered a relationship and regular meetups with Duchess France [Women in Tech], where we saw even more contributions to the Jenkins project.
Documentation—led by Mark Waite, Runxia Ye, and Daniel Beck: Whether it was documentation as code or developer documentation, these champions encouraged tremendous additions to the Jenkins project—from architectural diagrams to a series of videos illustrating the small steps a new contributor can take to modernize a plugin, to a total of 29 pull requests to migrate documentation from Wiki to GitHub (19 of which came from our very own Bees).
Content Security Policy—led by Daniel Beck and Wadeck Follonier: Six contributors provided pull requests to Jenkins Core to prepare Jenkins to implement Content Security Policy protections against JavaScript embedded in HTML. Wadeck also presented a tutorial for broader adoption and implementation of the Content Security Policy. There is a great write-up with more details that you can read here.
Infrastructure—led by Damien Duportal and Olivier Vernin: Three different Bees resolved multiple issues in the updatecli project and infrastructure project. They also worked on the important effort of triaging issues, extracting the expertise and knowledge from minds into tickets as well as improvements to infrastructure onboarding.
We also had Bryan Guinn and Jean-Marc Meessen championing New Bee introductions where they identified missing documentation and created a “getting started” document that points to various helpful documentation to help newcomers or less experienced Bees make contributions in all shapes and sizes. Darin Pope and Robert Sandell also led an effort to address maintenance tasks and dependency updates. You can check out the Contributor Summit where Mark Waite demonstrates what this work entailed.
The proof is in the code. This past year’s Hacktoberfest at CloudBees was a resounding success. Whether you are a developer or have the gift of gab in multiple languages; whether you have a keen eye for design, are a great writer, or whether you’re an excellent coordinator, everyone can contribute! We surveyed our internal participants at the end and received a high Net Promoter Score of 90, showing that CloudBees participants thought the experience was very rewarding. The beauty of running an event like this is not only the tangible benefits to the Jenkins project, but also the intangibles like cross-departmental collaboration, fun, and the fostering of better relationships among Bees. We look forward to running more Hacktoberfests at CloudBees in the future and encourage all, no matter your knowledge or skill level, to join in on the fun and give back to the open source community!
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