The Jenkins project has an interesting history. It started from scratch in my spare time, and has grown over time to boast 800+ open-source plug-ins developed by 300+ contributors from all around the world. There are several key ingredients, both technical and social, that enabled this model, and I think those ingredients are useful to other projects. In this talk, I'll discuss how the Jenkins project and the community work, what the ingredients are, why they help you attract more developers into your projects, and why it matters.
Kohsuke Kawaguchi is the creator of Jenkins. He wrote the majority of the Jenkins core single-handedly. He has over 10 years of extensive experience in software development, ranging from Java to C++, .NET to x64 assembly, as well as system expertise on platforms including Windows, Linux and Solaris. This broad range of expertise was a key enabler in the development of various advanced features of Jenkins. Aside from Jenkins, Kohsuke was involved in JAXB, Metro web services stack, GlassFish v3, and RELAX NG at Sun Microsystems. He's also known for a large number of open-source projects, such as args4j, YouDebug, com4j, Animal Sniffer, Sorcerer, wagon-svn, MSV, Parallel JUnit extension. Today Kohsuke is an elite architect and developer at CloudBees, where he spends his days bringing Jenkins to the cloud and making the Jenkins core even better.
See http://www.kohsuke.org/ [1] for more information about Kohsuke.
