UI/UX Hackfest. Frequently Asked Questions

Jenkins user experience is one of the most popular negative feedback we get from users. There is a wide perception that the Jenkins Web UI is dated compared to other CI/CD projects. This is not something new, this topic was discussed multiple times at contributor summits and finally led to the creation of the Jenkins UX SIG which currently coordinates the Look&Feel improvements in Jenkins. Our user documentation is also quite difficult to use: complex navigation on jenkins.io, a lot of user documentation still being on Wiki, etc. All these problems create negative optics for the project and impact Jenkins adoption, and IMO there are many opportunities to improve it. There are also a lot of newcomer-friendly and small stories that could be handled by contributors.

These dates are quite close, yes. We propose these dates based on the availability of event hosts. It also fits the Google Summer of Code timeline. The event happens on the last week of the community bonding, and hence it would give accepted students and newcomer mentors time to be introduced to the wider Jenkins community. It also gives more opportunities to GSoC mentors who may also want to participate.

We need your email to contact you about the event and swag/prize delivery. We will NOT keep/use this data after the event, and we will not be sharing the collected data with event sponsors or other 3rd parties. If you are not comfortable with sharing your email, please submit your registration via our Gitter chat.

If you are new to Jenkins, you could start by fixing some newcomer-friendly issues which are listed on the main event page. Jenkins project contains lots of materials about contributing to the project. Here are some links which may help:

If you get stuck, do not hesitate to ask in the hackfest chat!

Unless a project idea is explicitly marked as advanced topic, this is something which could be doable by newcomers. In the case of doubt, please ask in the hackfest chat.

Below there are some queries which can be used to find newcomer-friendly issues:

We deployed a special GitHub repository which will be used to collect contributions and to generate reports from the event. Please report your code and non-code contributions as GitHub issues, there are issues templates for common types of contributions.

You can find full guidelines here.

It is fine to record contributions before they get initial reviews and get merged. Once you submit a pull request or publish a post/video about Jenkins, please feel free to report the contribution. Unless it is marked as invalid afterwards during the review, it will be counted.

Please do not target creating a maximum number of records, we will take contribution sizes into account during ranking. If you are working on a single area (e.g. "testing the Windows installation guide" or "improving a Neo2 theme") during a day, please record it as a single contribution even if it involves multiple pull requests or issues.

Yes, you can join at any moment until the end of the hackfest. Register here.

Yes, it is fine! Any contributions to Jenkins user experience counts, your role in a repository does not matter. Just make sure you create pull requests instead of direct pushes (hint: it’s a best practice anyway if you have a CI configured for your repository).

Yes, you can! You could help with UX testing, reviews or spreading the word about Jenkins. Such contributions do not require submitting code, and hence they are not subject to common regulations in enterprise companies. Please note that it is NOT an official legal advice, your mileage may vary.

All featured project ideas are monitored by their maintainers, and you will likely get a review soon. Reviews in other repositories and plugins may take longer. In case of delays, please ping us in the chat.

Unmerged pull-requests also count as contributions unless they are marked as invalid. Merge delays won’t block you from getting prizes.

Reviewing changes is also a contribution, and sometimes it takes more time and effort than the actual patch. We will count code reviews and other substantial non-code contributions. How to report contributions.