Jenkins Pipeline Authoring, 7 Feb 2020

Previous Meeting Next Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: Pipeline-Authoring SIG Weekly Meeting for Feb. 7, 2020

Description

Pipeline-Authoring SIG Weekly Meeting for Feb. 7, 2020

Agenda:
- Personas (Cont)
- 2nd meeting time that is EU friendly
- Jenkins developer document walkthrough

A

Hello, everybody welcome to the pipeline och sig meeting. This is our weekly meeting. We need February seventh to 2020 welcome good afternoon good morning. Wherever you are evening, I am mark Marky, Jackson, aye, I, don't know what I did I'm saying did.

B

I do a lot of things.

A

So do I have a note I.

B

Can at least run the screen sharing I'm Liam, Newman, hello. Everyone also on the call, our Steve tirana and Mark wait.

B

C

B

C

I'm not gonna, volunteer to take notes, because I reserve the right to drop off I've got a single topic that I'm trying to explore and so I'll leave it to somebody else to take notes. Okay, so awesome.

D

I believe it is my turn for note-taking I will I'll. Take the note. Okay.

B

A

Know one of the things that we talked about last week was the personas I did get those personas linked and they are in the document. I do think, however, we may jump but the chain a bit here. Yeah I, want to ask mark I, want to ask you a question: would you be, or are you going to be attending these meetings regularly.

C

Probably not you have a specific topic. Yes, but okay, awesome, I, I! Don't think that I, don't I suspect. Most of the topics here will not be things that would bring me in immediately.

A

Beautiful, so we are going to move the new item which is meeting times to the end, since we don't need you for that. But I am willing to say that you we can bring your topic up to the head of the list. That way, we don't keep you your wealth to stay, but there you go. So our topic was how best to document pipelines where to put a.

D

A

How best to describe yeah.

D

A

I think Steven really said that said this and said it well, is that this is really falls into the personas.

C

Okay, so so maybe for my benefit, do we want to do a review of the personas that you're envisioning? That would help me and it may help others who view this later, most definitely hey, so we've got while you're well as someone's bringing up that personas doc.

C

We've certainly got a number of places where we are describing the how to use pipeline. We've got the Jenkins I/o documentation. We've got Jenkins minute. Videos that Liam had created. We've got several other places.

C

We've got documentation, built right into the the executable that presents computes the the help and shows it live in aim what appears to be multi megabyte page okay, we've got a bunch of Doc's I'm, not sure that we're reaching the right people and so persona seems like so Liam. Maybe you want to open up the personas document. That's linked there sure, while.

A

You're doing that I'm going to talk about something related, or at least in the same vein, about what you're talking about Marc, that I found interesting and frustrating, and that was the developer. Documentation guide is very fragmented. Much like you described right now. It is all over the place and because I have a little bit intimate knowledge about how we are structuring our Doc's I know where to look.

A

But what what dawned on me and the reason I asked in in your in your Doc's channel, was what, if somebody didn't have that knowledge I almost feel like. We need to have a landing page that really points people to one set of like I. Almost I could think about mine if you will for our documentation to make it easier for newcomers and the reason I thought about that is because, in the fit saying a google Summer of Code as students come on and they're trying to figure out how to do things.

A

They're, like I, don't know and I'm like go here, but when you go there, you're gonna also need to go here and then like multiply that by like 50 and that's the links I'm giving them.

B

So when you talk about developer documentation you, what do you mean by that? Are you talking about, like the I'm unwinding, a stack here so marketing? My question is like developer. Documentation is what so.

A

In this case, what I would do not.

B

As extensive not extend to Jenkins stuff right, not the no right bucket well.

A

I think what you first do- and this is where we have to have our inception of personas- is I- am a developer. That knows nothing about Jenkins. Where do I go I want to do something code related with Jenkins. Where do I go? Okay? Well, you have now fork in the road you can go on the core maintaining or you can write a plug-in.

A

Here's where we now diverge the path of documentation, but we do have that in all kinds of different places and for the person coming on for the first time that doesn't know that it could be a large sort of undertaking just even understand where they should go. I.

D

C

D

I think before we even get to like a major restructuring, what we should look at. What's the level of effort to add a search functionality right like.

A

There there's some tools.

D

Out there there's some tools out there that can index the static site to expose like an index that can be used for a search box. I think that alone would go a huge way to be able to find a specific topic right, I'm, looking at the change in documentation now- and there is no way from a page that I'm on to to actually search the docs for like a keyword but I'm looking for so.

C

You wouldn't just use Google, search or Bing, or you choose your favorite search engine to do.

A

That the concern with doing.

C

A

Is I have found and I like to use examples of how I can try did something? There was a gentleman in the kubernetes slack channel in the Jenkins channel. That was asking questions about octa and my first thing when he pinged me offline at DM was: did you, google, this and he's like yeah and I found a bunch of cloudBees documentation? Not only tells me 1/4 of the story, so that's the thing right.

A

So when people do Google things, they get a mixture of Jenkins, they get a mixture of cloud, B's and and I think we need to do good. We've got a maybe bit better at separating that I.

D

Think also, it would require it sort of assumes a level of Google foo that everyone might not have right if you're trying to search specifically the Jenkins Docs, you should add, like the site prefix to your Google search, so it restricts the results to Jenkins that io / Docs and then you're still relying heavily on Google to index everything appropriately.

D

It's definitely a possible solution, but I think there are some frameworks out there that, for a pretty low level of effort, can add a search box and index of site during, like the generation of the static site, to to make your search more tuned for your content, yeah.

B

I mean like so if I'm looking for time out, I mean I think this gets gets me to the right. Spot gets me the right page, but it doesn't necessarily get me well kind of actually no. This doesn't. This got me two basic steps, as opposed to, if I'm looking like how do I, how do I add a timeout to my like this Google search, definitely did not is not getting me where I need to go. It.

C

Actually did the first page that you hit okay basic, but because it's a single page, you have to find time out in the right-hand block and click it right. Yeah.

B

So so, and there actually is even anchor, so this is a good example like this is where one of those one of those tools would probably actually take you. This anchor like that be much more useful right.

D

Okay and while we're looking at an example like that like it would be interesting to see an actual code snippet of using that like I, but.

B

D

I have an experience this.

B

This this thing right here it out or generated so pretty. Obviously so that I mean that there's there's text that someone wrote: that's that's fine, but I'm pretty sure this probably comes from the Javadoc or something else well,.

C

So Salim, if you take a different, let's take a different page and let's look at one, that's still still: auto-generated, okay, I'll, look for step, slash, workflow, SCM steps and let's look at the get step.

C

Oops I gave you a bad data. Look for steps, I'll find it here. Have some steps yeah there. It's this page steps reference search for the word, get space plugin, okay and click get there okay. So this is a page. That's still generated mmm-hmm, but is is populated with examples, because the examples were placed inside the source. That's read by the generator okay.

C

So this that means that we need that the try to kind of off or plug in authors have to insert the the examples into their into their into their documentation into their that's or.

B

So that's what needs to happen is this wow. That link is interesting, okay, time out, so the link is there alright.

C

Yeah, so so it's very much doable and that's doable incrementally by doing pull requests to to these target repositories for their their documentation. So that's very much. We can do that on this generated page I. Don't think that would solve the navigation problem. You highlighted earlier, where hey I didn't find with a search, something that took me straight to timeout right. You were looking for specific information about timeout tonight.

C

What what yeah exactly and what it gave you instead was a single page that has all the keywords in it or a whole bunch of keywords in it, and you have to get lucky too find it right. You have to oh now, look for the table of contents. Oh there, it is it's in there. So.

B

I would it's also an interesting point for the generation like if there's a way for the auto generator to control this, then having each of these be on their own? Almost on their own page would be better right, yeah might be anymore, I mean, would get us better, Google results, because then right.

C

And that's that's you.

D

Separate I think there's two separate modes to talk about right: there's: navigation once you're on the site. How do I find my way around and then there's also the separate problem of like I need to find a very specific thing: do I, search from within Jenkins CI, so there's better developer experience or do I have to open a new tab and do a Google search and find it all right. So.

A

We can talk.

D

About, what's the best way to modularize the documentation to make it easier to find things? How do we organize those modules so that you naturally can find your way to them, and how do we bubble them up through a search functionality, whether that's Google or an internal search functionality, using like a lunar or something similar to that is some conversation.

C

And good insight, which, which leads us almost back to the back to the notion of personas, and how does the head of those personas interact with the documentation? That's perfect! Thank you. Okay,.

C

So I think I think I've I've taken enough time from the the cig meeting. I don't need to do rail on the docks. Well, like we've got the.

B

Sort of the thing that we're talking about so it's probing yeah continue. Sorry I, just don't feel like you have to like run off.

B

C

It feels like we've got a, and maybe what we should do is let me catch or capture in the notes that we've got a navigation challenge right, there's a there's, a navigation, so fine and then there's a then there's a structural thing about how do we organize it such that it? Well. Maybe that is navigation right, there's that well.

B

C

Survival, what are they searching for and why yeah.

B

And also, how do we, how do we generate it and like where it was? What is the source of the documentation right, okay,.

D

We know what the current framework is: that's being used to to create the content from I'm, assuming something like markdown or asciidoc. It's.

C

As well well, actually well, I think. The combination is those pages that we were looking at, so the the page that we looked at with a git plugin yeah mm-hmm that one that actually is written in the plug-in source code as the HTML help for that step, and then a generator extracts from each of the plugins there's their snippets of HTML health and their parameter descriptions. So, in this case, I authored this thing by writing HTML in in a specific file and they get plug-in repository.

C

B

Had to write the HTML for it, not just ASCII dr. Marc done right.

C

It's it's really. It's jelly. If I remember I know, I'll have to go, look to see, but I think it's jelly. No, no I. Take it back, it's definitely not jelly in it. It is help because jelly is used for the UI forms, but not for the the online help. The online help comes from just HTML files, but inside the plugin source code. So it's.

B

C

B

C

To get plug-in here, yes, if you go into source main resources,.

C

And now I think it's probably under Jenkins plugins get get step in that directory. You'll find help, dot, HTML click it and, let's see yeah there. It is.

B

So we don't Wow, okay, so.

D

Did this mom get pulled directly in to the website yeah.

C

So the wrote the website is is static, is a static site right, and so there is a separate background process that extracts documentation from plug-in contributors and places it into those pages for use in the in the static site.

D

So I'm, just thinking from a security perspective, if I were to put an arbitrary post.

B

Went in spot, like oh dear, did.

D

I do that can.

B

I add a script.

D

Block that does whatever JavaScript I want to on the docs page sure.

C

Sure, if you are a plug-in maintainer and if you have I mean you, you have just described a supply chain exploit right and there are a lot more interesting ways to do supply chain exploits than than a HTML page. If, if I'm going to be a do a supply chain exploit, let's exploit the source code of the get plug-in or something like that, it's much much more frequently executed than people visiting a web page. mmm Yes,.

D

C

It's a it's: a supply chain exploit exploit. I am.

D

I'm thinking about, like someone registers a new plugin that looks like it has functionality, but really what their goal was was to add some some nefarious, HTML yeah I mean I, don't probably different rabbit hole. It's.

C

But it's the same. It's the same, exploit! Yes, absolutely! If, if we, if we take a nefarious plug-in into the ecosystem, they could do harm.

B

All right so so we've but anyways. So the question that the question that I have here actually is: can we make this easier? Just like writing HTML to get documentation is not not preferable.

B

You're awesome but I suspect most most containers wouldn't either not have a time or not not. Have the inclination to well write documentation but also write it in HTML yeah.

D

So I'm currently dealing with the documentation issues on you know. In my day, job and there's a framework out there, that's targeted at distributed documentation called an Torah. So the idea is you give it a playbook file that just says all the different repositories. You want to pull documentation from it's all written and asciidoc, and it gets pulled together right. So there are hundreds, if not thousands, of Jenkins plugins.

D

So a migration is a very large level of effort, but picturing a perfect world where, like every plugin, has a Doc's directory that has modules for documentation and then a giant ant or a playbook that pulls it all together and generate the static site, lowers the technical barrier to entry for people needing to know how to write, HTML and starts to let you do it in asciidoc and a slightly more user from the way. Yes,.

C

Something like we have something very much enter alike that generates the Jenkins that IO site- it's not specifically enteric a Xanterra didn't exist at the time we created the Jenkins io site. But yes, the concept that you're using is describing is a good one.

C

This this is specifically reusing online, help that we provide to users to also present it as our documentation, and so it's that this is a rather obscure case, the general purpose case of describing tutorials or describing how to guides those are written in ASCII doc and then an Torres and others are very happy to take asciidoc and present them.

B

mmm So, for instance, this this help is actually is. You can get to it from inside Jenkins to write correctly that there's a one of the question mark spots, so hover yeah, one of the notes there was stuff that appears to the side. Basically, there little question marks well.

C

It's a just to be to be absolutely precise this because it is a pipeline step. Is that not available on any class, because there really isn't a pipeline step for a question mark right? What happens, though, when you're inside Jenkins, if I go to pipeline syntax to the snippet generator the pipeline syntax page.

B

Okay, anyways continue, yes, yeah.

C

If I go there, then there is a link which will take me to which will generate that documentation and show it to me and- and it generates documentation for all of all of the pipeline keywords and then puts them into a collapsed list and then I can navigate to my specific keyword, expand it and see all that documentation the and that that's that's great, except that that means in my Jenkins instance, I'm generating a multi megabyte file yeah.

C

So if you open one of those open a pipeline job- oh no, actually you can even do it here. Just put slash pipeline syntax on the end of your URL, it's also available from inside any jenk any job that's uses pipeline, but this will get us there. Okay online documentation, the second from there. Third from the bottom there, when you click that you're going to wait, awhile, no just straight to.

B

C

Okay, so so that's different than my local Jenkinson's is.

B

Might be a little older but in any case now.

C

You've got me inspired, I've got a well anyways, there is a hang on and I'll find it, and we can show it here here. We go I.

B

Go to the go to the snippet trainer in there and select get the get step, for example, I get right there, you go, there's the yeah and it comes off of this little.

C

Exactly that's where that child, and all of that HTML that we read is in fact yeah.

C

On line goes straight to Jenkins that I have examples, reference, okay, Oh steps reference there. It is Liam, okay, go above yes that reference when you click that wait a while in it usually generates that, for my wait, keep waiting, keep waiting because it's it's still generating. You see that spinning up at the top, it's still spinning, I see and that steps reference will take a good long time to jet. Okay, now it's done and now, if you click that get and now it expands, there's another view of it. Okay, so, gentlemen,.

A

I apologize for interrupting that to drop for something Liam I made you the host. Okay. Thank.

C

You thanks thanks, Marky, well and and I think I've I think I've achieved the pieces that I was most worried about or most trying to to get insights on. We've got people who think about this and you're. It's not like you're open to the idea that we might consider generating not just the single page on Jenkins at I/o for a step, but have a page for keyword as well or.

B

Something I mean let the right there's ways to improve that navigation, yeah, okay,.

B

All right, yeah and we're definitely open. You have just as much power on Jenkins IO as anyone else pretty much right. So you can. You could actually now advocate that forward. Right.

C

Absolutely I was more looking for opinions. Okay, then proposals for the of who did who will do the work right, okay, I'm, I'm, trying to understand, and, for instance, I had missed the fundamental concept of personas that was brought up earlier here. It's like! Oh, yes, that's right. There are different reasons why people come looking for things right and that, thanks for letting me take that time, I propose I'll call an end to my topic.

C

Okay, because there's more to be thought about- and this is a not- this- is a very reasonable place to do it for discussion specifically about pipeline. Where there's a lot of interest in pipeline document right now, yeah.

B

Cool well, thank you thanks.

D

B

So, let's see here, Marky was running this show and he actually had to drop. So, let's.

D

Leave next up was a persona documentation right. So we've had conversations in previous meetings about trying to get her better sense of who our users are try to categorize them into reasonable personas Marky was nice enough to put that doc together. So maybe we can start going through that right.

B

And I was basically I was looking at. He divides these up by I. Think coding, experience, OSS experience, I'm, not sure what he meant there and what the the some experience may be. The general experience like industry or CI I'm not sure what the what that third dimension of items, that he was looking for. There no codes and he had divided up to no code. Some code and lots of code looks like yep and OSS, not OSS, and then looks like three different.

B

In language out of language and yeah, I'm still trying to figure out exactly how he mm-hmm how he divided that up. Yeah.

D

It looked like it was around how much coding experience does the person have how engaged so they've been in an open source community in general and then how long have they been in the industry?.

D

There might be some tweaking we want to make to that, to make this a little bit more Jenkins centric right. So a Java developer, with 20 years of experience could have no experience with Jenkins, so we probably want an access in our personas that targeted at how much Jenkins specific experience to somebody have.

B

Right, okay, so.

C

When did you clarify for me Liam what you would, what I should infer by industry experience so I, don't know the language, or is that that I've done continuous integration before III.

B

Still am not clear on what that, so, what I'm looking at is this last he is divided. He has three characteristics on as this like top-level descriptor of each persona, but I don't know what he meant by this last one, because the values so far are some experience.

B

Lots of experience and in language, family and outside language, family.

D

Yeah I was confused as well. I think well, maybe need to talk to marki about yeah. What exactly that one? Yes, the more axes. We have the bigger of a combinatorics problem. This becomes right if we've got three did three different ones. Now we've got what nine different personas potentially yeah looks.

B

D

B

I think there's ways to collapse some of these a little bit, but it looks like he's, got roughly three three by four, so he's got like 12, some no yeah, basically a through D and one two and three so yeah twelve. But I. Don't know how that, where that that comes from exactly just some experience, just going to list out the combinations here.

B

And there I think he might have some overlap, some like two different things or something.

D

Yeah I know that he had mentioned. This was a repurposed from a previous writer.

A

D

And there might be some remnants from that right. Just thinking about the axes and I think there's also an important asset of scale. Are you building a pipeline for a single team? Are you building a pipeline, for you know a set of development teams and you're part of an internal tooling internal, tooling team within your organization, because their needs are typically a little bit different. I do think that we want to. We probably want to set it kappa, how many personas we have right.

D

We probably want to scope it to like four or five max yeah.

B

D

Experience people like to people like to name the personas so that, like they just become a part of our conversation like Sally as an experienced developer working at a large scale, I think implementation.

B

So this matrix is a little larger than we wanted to be for now, but I think it's a good place to start talking. So let me just grab this I'm just trying to get a high-level view of what he was.

B

Nois versus OSS.

B

Lots: okay, so.

B

Let me let's just start here: we have someone who just wants to be a part of the community, sees opportunities to convey, contribute and looking to adds to test a new career. Okay,.

D

So this is sort of like the getting started persona. This is somebody that maybe just started in software development. They find their first role as someone that needs to help automate software delivery processes.

D

So what are what are their needs right there, they're, probably when we go back to that, that idea of an on-ramp they're, probably starting at the beginning of that on-ramp, they need to understand what is Jenkins and what do you use it, for they probably need a lot of examples of different use. Cases.

D

They'll need to understand that, like what is a Jenkins pipeline in the first place, I think there's a lot of implicit understanding that, like Jenkins pipelines, are a custom DSL on top of groovy. That would probably be a good thing to explain like a high-level overview of what even is a Jenkins pipeline right.

B

D

Ran that's the end of my ramble at this point so.

B

What I'm sort of add here is what what do they need like what so their motivations are this, but like? How can we I wasn't trying to I think about like how can we engage them? But maybe that's this too early to think about that, because we're still trying to sort of define these out so Susan, okay, I'm Tracy, what he's looking at may over volunteer so all right May.

B

So this is no code. I, don't know what the lots of experience is I'm, assuming it's! It's like I,.

D

Do feel like so far, they're sort of there seems to be an assumption in these personas that the person wants to be involved in the open-source community. That's probably a much smaller percentage of of users that are looking to get involved in the community right. A lot of people found that Jenkins is a good tool. They want to use it and they want to. They want to basically accomplish their ticket in their sprint and move on.

D

Not everyone is going to want to join SIG's and get her channels.

B

Absolutely let's actually, let's let's talk about this, so you have, let's just pick up some ideas here so yeah, even through a a new enthusiast I'm just trying to look. Maybe we should just talk about it a little bit and the people that we've met in the in working on Jenkins, rather than like try to be like really thorough, looks like okay, so who have I talked to right.

C

I think I think we have Yuri. The utilitarian, which is Steven, was just describing right. Yuri, the utilitarian really just wants to get the job done and does not want to waste any time and can't afford to spend any time helping a community, etc, etc. Anything there just get the job done and and get back to there solving the real problem, which is creating great software in something and.

D

I'd probably say that at least 80% of the community, if I had to guess, if we look at the fact that Jenkins as millions of users worldwide I, don't think, there's.

C

No even 5% or more as human behavior holds any any usual thing. It's probably between the 95 to 99 percent range right. Most of us are utilitarian. Yeah right.

B

Something that I used to do to my job I don't have time to I'm to engage.

D

D

Right and the sort of an inverse relationship between their engagement in the community and their understanding of experience right, like a utilitarian type person, wants to be able to find things quickly, find examples, implemented, modify and move on, people that are involved in the community or have probably more context to why things are the way they are and they're going to be more understanding of maybe sub optimized documentation organization tying off of our last topic, they're, not to pick on the docks at all. No so.

B

Docks come: do it do what I want to do and I'm out.

B

If I can figure it out, ah that's the other one. If I can figure it out, I.

B

Figure out how to do what I want to do without like even going to the docks I will like they're, not even they're, not even going to go to the the mail. The the dev list, they're not going to ask a question: they're just going to do some quick searches and run away and if they can't find it quickly, they're just going to hack it together.

D

Right- and that probably means that this person is also the least likely to read about best practices or be strict about implementing them right. They're gonna find an example hack it to do what they needed to do and move on to the next ticket.

D

Right a lot of times when I find someone asking a channel question in the channel for the first time, they're, probably utilitarian, that got stuck and.

C

D

Go and see what the situation is and they took a tutorial and then added 50 lines of code and now they're they're looking to make that next step to maybe make this scale better.

D

All right in that transition is probably an interesting thing to talk about too. We want to figure out how to that pipeline of people go from utilitarian to contributor to maintainer or whatnot right like how do we get more and more people engage to help out with these things, because it makes everything a little bit easier. The more help we have.

B

D

So those watching online, if you want to help, maintain a couple plugins. Let me know.

B

Yeah- and this is I mean this is where we end up with the silent, the silent majority on that that use Jenkins right.

B

B

So I mean I've I've talked before about this and I, just never on the number of community and I still haven't actually done. It is like creating a plugin that that looks for patterns and usage and just like pops, but something in the log messages saying hey. This is where you want to go to find out about that right so that we have some some engagement with with people.

D

Is Google Analytics hooked up to the documentation at all, like the? Is there a way to get metrics around who's? Looking at what yes.

C

And it's significant effort to get the analytics, but we have a feedback site where people give us say: hey give us your feedback on this, which still continues to receive very interesting comments. Some of them rather inflammatory the others, others really painfully brutal. You have the get plugin page. The one that we looked at earlier today was the most hated of any page on the entire site and had the most negative comments.

C

Thus, I spent some effort trying to make it better right, we'll see if that actually helps with the inflammatory comments that we did, that.

D

Just means that it's one of the most popular it's a numbers game, that's.

C

A that's, a lovely, positive way to look at it I like that. That's a very good positive way to look at it. Whatever the reason it was the top as having negative comments, and so we picked it first to target I.

B

Remember when I was working on this more the one that actually got the most most number of views was the one on he was on agents and the the problem was that it was blank and it was just like comes like what is this, which just tells us like. Oh, this is something that needs get built. Yeah anyways.

B

D

Go back to personas right, we cook, we covered the person, that's maybe getting started for the first time the silent majority I think the next step, I, probably I'm- probably the newest Jenkins community member on the call right now so I think the next step is doing the Gator channels. Right, like you, have a problem. Stack Overflow hasn't been helpful. The docks haven't been helpful, so you try to figure out like who can I talk to about this.

D

So you joined a gator channel, so the people that have gotten to this point probably have some Jenkins experience right. They have at least used Jenkins enough to know that they have a problem. The Ducks can solve mm-hmm.

B

I'm trying to think of a they're still kind of on the utilitarian end, but their social utilitarian yeah.

D

Maybe even like power users like there are people that the average or most common use cases aren't working for because, if they, if they were working, they probably wouldn't need to have engaged on the Gator channel right.

C

D

C

Call it Devon the desperate utilitarian.

B

Are they desperate? Oh, it's not always desperate, some of them they're. They just need to do. They're like mmm they're there they've moved from just like I just used to get it done. Can I use this to do something like can I use this to do one more thing over there right, okay,.

C

So an extended extended utilitarian yeah, so Erik the extended utilitarian.

B

Yeah I'm trying to keep some mixture of genders in here too. So, oh so.

C

B

I. Thank you. Oh very good, yeah.

C

C

B

B

This is usually the point where people like, oh I, can I can get drinking to do something join in asking questions.

D

Alright- and at this point they start to have some desire to understand best practice right, they're, probably at a point where they want this to be easier for them. So they want to start aligning their pipelines to different design patterns that will make it easier for them to build and maintain I just.

B

I just realized what this is. The person that this most often is is I was told that I need to go to use. Jenkins I was I was told, I was handed the Jenkins instance after after after Yuri left I.

C

Apologize I've got a drop-off to fade out. Thank you very much.

B

Thanks for joining us and hope to see you again on here at least.

D

See I run into this persona, frequently yeah I I inherited a Jenkins instance. There's a lot going on I'm not familiar with what do I do next right.

D

Most of the time they didn't inherit a perfect Jenkins following best practices, they inherited somewhat of a rat's nest because the person before them did what they had to to get it done, and they start to want to optimize learning.

B

B

Understand quite a bit.

B

Well, so they have a Idol working.

B

Working system system to base my work, my understanding on.

B

But it doesn't make a lot of sense. Yeah.

D

It's in your experience, how how frequently are the maintainer zuv jenkins, the administrators different, using a different role than like the authors of the pipeline, at least in my experience, if you're administering jenkins are probably also the person writing the pipelines but I like.

B

This little, that's it the.

D

Industry, that's true well,.

B

At this level, yeah I think you are basically after this like when you go beyond this, you get to I'm I'm, a member of a team. That's been that's! That's doing! Jenkins, though, that I'm, a member of the DevOps team, that that manages a Jenkins for, like my my group right.

B

If you get it, you get sort of single team, you get a team or a person that does this for it, for one or more like it's just that now they move beyond just one team to a bit more and they're doing yeah so somewhere and here you go from I, write the pipelines to somebody else, right that writes the pipelines right or it's weird, because on one level you have the people that I, don't I, don't get lost, just in um so.

B

Help and best practices to.

B

It so I can do less starts this person they're, probably not going to contribute to Jenkins they're still looking they're they're, not gonna, be part of the community. In that respect. They might you know, but they'll be on. They might be on the channels. They were gonna. Ask questions David they've at least engaged someone right, yeah.

D

I think these people are the bug reporters, but not the fixers.

B

B

D

I think that's there all right and then I think there's probably two more right. We talked about the DevOps team, okay,.

B

D

Then the then we go all the way up to plug in maintainer. So.

B

Devops team member.

B

Let's just let's, let's make sure that we got that sick of it and then you have community member.

D

In developers, yeah I think we can group all those like super advanced users into a common bucket of maybe years of power, users or plugin developers.

B

Project contributors: let's go with that that word. It's.

D

B

I'm, so everyone contributes as long as they're, even even just asking questions. That's that's helpful but like, but no I'm just trying to see whether or not that's that's a sufficient.

B

Contributor might not be.

D

Well, I think contributor could be like you help out on a particular plugin or you answer people's questions in the in the channel like these. These are really the pillars of the community that help out other people: okay, whether that's through plug-in development or answering questions, I, think all those people probably have the same more.

B

Or less than thing for from from our perspective, people that are, you know, involved with the community, are going to be like in a so.

B

People that long-term project contributors- this are all served in the same bucket at that point, you've got the resources to find questions. You know who to talk to you'll, be you know, saying: oh I'm, gonna talk to this person or I know that this is a problem, so I'll ask that you know or I'll go over there. um They're already.

B

Well-Versed enough to they're.

D

Tied in right, yeah.

B

D

Have a network yeah.

B

D

Serious if we focus on the the DevOps team member for a bit try to flush that out.

D

This is definitely where I probably relate the most yeah.

B

Exactly um I think there might be there might be one at least one more persona in here, but I think this is a good start because we're and we're almost a time but I think so. I don't know if you want to fill this that out a bit. What what do you think here so.

D

I think I think person that the dev ops team member starts to worry about different design patterns and reusability right they're supporting multiple team simultaneously. They need to understand how to how to do that right. It is so hard to take off my company engine hat, because literally, why I wrote it. So it's like this I'm trying to think back to what my problems were before trying to solve them, and it was.

A

D

Right, so it was really about how do you? How do you build and maintain pipelines at scale for multiple teams? So there's that's when, like global shared library starts to come in because you want to modularize code right. So at this point, like this team member is usually the person that has written a giant global, shared library for their team, that different teams end up consuming.

D

They start to care more about best practices like jenkins, performance and utilization right.

A

D

That you're building and Jenkins instance that's going to support multiple teams. You have a lot more concerns about some resource utilization and like a distributed architecture.

D

I'm trying to think if this person fixes plug-ins like I, don't I, don't.

B

D

They do all right.

B

It might contribute, but I mean like I.

D

Think sorry, though, yeah for ease of separating it I think it's safe to say this person might like fix issue on existing plugins. We need to draw the line somewhere right along.

A

D

Project contributors are like the initial: it will create the plug-in and maybe they'll guide direction and stuff, but you lil lean on these DevOps team members, also file bugs and help start fixing them right, they're, probably more involved in the community, starting to answer people's questions because they have that experience at scale.

D

This person cares a lot about training for pipeline consumption right if they're maintaining a centralized Jenkins instance. That means that other people are consuming the pipeline, so documentation and and developer experience start to matter to them. Hopefully,.

B

D

All right, if I could get a list of all of these people, I would love to give a talk at that right.

B

I mean these are probably the people that we see most often at Jenkins world I. Don't got that kind of thing right. Yes, just.

D

I was just like they just by the nature of the fact that they're on a DevOps team, they probably work at a larger company, where the role of the DevOps engineer has been centralized to a common team.

B

So I answered your question for my team or group. I need to be able to teach others to do to do pipelines to write pipelines.

D

Yes, overwrite.

B

D

B

Or to confluent I need it I need it. I need to teach others to use Jenkins like that's what they're like yeah.

D

Do whatever yeah alright and that could be as simple as like I need to teach the developers how to look at build box or view their test results. All the way up to I need to teach the development teams how to create a pipeline.

D

Yeah, okay, I've seen a lot of different DevOps teams that, like right, that shared library and then all the development teams just pass different input parameters to it or something because they end up having documentation around how that works right. So these people are creating abstractions on top of Jenkins pipeline to facilitate scale.

B

So we're out of time I, don't know how long this Marcus thing would go for, but let's so now that we've started writing this out. Let's think on this. For this week we didn't get a.

D

Good start yeah.

B

We didn't get to talking about a having a different alternate meeting time, maybe every other week, but we can do that in the Gator channel if you're watching this on YouTube recorded later join us in the Gator channel and we're gonna be figuring out a time to do these meetings at least every other week, or something that that supports more time zones. So, and so, let's say you're Stephen Drew, you and me.

B

Maybe we can kind of continue building out this list sort of think about whether or not there's I think there's I think there might be one more person in here there's because I think I think what you've got here. The one thing I would say: I think that the DevOps team member there's probably at least two personas in there.

B

One of them is someone who's actually doing what you, which has moved into that like I'm gonna, write like shared library and tools and like that sort of bigger version and there's a slightly lower version of that. That's that's a little closer to the look. Iii I write pipelines, I use pipelines like they're, maybe not thinking of that one next haven't gotten to that next level of abstraction, right, yeah, I, agree.

D

I think I think we have a good point. I can try to flush this out and then next week we can pick this back up and hopefully Marquis will be able to join and we can talk through the content that was already here. Cool.

B

D

B

D

B

D