Contributed by Zainab Abubakar
CDF Newsletter – August 2020 Article
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I started contributing to Jenkins documentation during the technical writer exploration phase for Google Season of Docs 2020. I chose Jenkins project because I understood this project from a user point of view as I had been exposed to setting up, configuring, and using Jenkins to automate CI/CD processes in Interswitch Engineering, where I currently work as a software engineer. I piqued interest in two of Jenkins project ideas, Plugin documentation migration and update and Document Jenkins on Kubernetes.
My first contribution to Jenkins documentation was improving and migrating Remote Access API user documentation from Wiki to Jenkins.io following the documentation page conversion instructions and Jenkins.io contributing guide. I was ecstatic when my first pull request was eventually merged after a series of reviews by the project maintainers. Subsequently, I’ve worked on improving and migrating other pages, some of which have been merged while others are still in review.
The Jenkins UI/UX Online Hackfest took place between the 25th and 29th of May 2020 to improve the Jenkins user experience, including but not limited to user interface and documentation. Since I was opportune to have started exploring the Jenkins project before then, I registered. I selected issues to update and migrate Reverse Proxy Configuration Page and Authenticating Scripted clients page from the list of available issues on the Jenkins.io GitHub repository. I worked on improving these pages in collaboration with other devs in the community like dduportal, with reviews from @jenkinsci maintainers MarkEWaite, Oleg Nenashev and other members of the Jenkins community. I was able to record two documentation improvements to these two pages during the hackfest. Find more details of my contributions during the hackfest here.
I must admit, being part of the Jenkins community has been an amazing journey for me. It has helped improve my technical writing skills, attention to detail, communication, and much more. The tremendous amount of support, encouragement and appreciation I get from the community also motivates me to keep contributing to this organization.
Participate and Contribute
The Jenkins Community is always open to welcoming new members, with so many ways to engage with the project and community, some of which include; organizing and attending events and meetups, coding, translating, design, documentation, and much more.
If you have further questions about contributing to Jenkins, you can reach out in the Newcomer or Advocacy and Outreach SIG channels.
