Marc Esher

Remaining more present by controlling information overload

A while back, I was made well aware of my, shall we say, un-presence. I’d be physically present with my family, but distracted the point of absence. Usually, it was due to a device stealing my time from them. The phone in my pocket was becoming a time-and-attention thief. A Facebook message. A Twitter reply. An email. I am still not great at this — my kids would probably say I’m terrible — but I’ve come a long way and thought I’d share some of my tactics for helping reduce social media and email overload. The point of this is to … Continue reading Remaining more present by controlling information overload

Jenkins-as-code: creating jobs from the command line during development

By Marc Esher

In the previous post in this series, I covered how to make a seed job for seed jobs via registration. In this post, I’ll cover my favorite development-time helper: running job scripts from the command line. The problem As our team was working on adopting this jenkins-as-code solution, I confess that local development was suboptimal. Because seed jobs pull from source control and then process job dsls, we’d have to build the dsl scripts, push to git, run the seed job, and run the built jobs, repeating as necessary till the job was working as desired. The workflow was slow enough … Continue reading Jenkins-as-code: creating jobs from the command line during development

Jenkins-as-code: registering jobs for automatic seed job creation

By Marc Esher

In the previous post in this series, I covered custom builders we’ve added on top of job-dsl-plugin. In this post, I’ll cover an innovative solution that’s made working with all these Jenkins-as-code repositories much easier. It centers around a seed job for seed jobs. What are seed jobs again? The job-dsl-plugin tutorial covers them thoroughly. In short, a seed job processes your job-dsl scripts and thus creates the Jenkins jobs from those scripts using the “Process Job DSLs” build step. You generally configure your seed jobs to listen for changes to the source code repo where you keep your jobs, such … Continue reading Jenkins-as-code: registering jobs for automatic seed job creation

Jenkins-as-code: creating reusable builders

By Marc Esher

In the first post in this series, I covered the problems we were having with job creation and maintenance and a very high level look at our solution. In the second post, I covered the job-dsl-plugin which underpins our solution. In this post, I’ll dig into the Builders we’ve added on top of job-dsl-plugin, which do the following for us add sensible defaults for all jobs make it easy to do the right thing for potentially complicated jobs or configurations provide utilities for common decision-making and code blocks establish a Builders pattern for use internally even if a job type isn’t all that … Continue reading Jenkins-as-code: creating reusable builders

Jenkins-as-code: job-dsl-plugin

By Marc Esher

In the first post in this series, I covered the problems we were having with job creation and maintenance and a very high level look at our solution. In this post, I’ll go more in depth with the solution, covering the job-dsl-plugin. I’m not going to recreate others’ documentation here, so for actual instructions, I’ll simply link to existing docs. job-dsl-plugin I’m assuming if you’re reading this that you’re quite familiar with creating Jenkins jobs, point-and-click style, via the Jenkins GUI. job-dsl-plugin is a Jenkins plugin that enables you to define Jenkins jobs in plain text, using a really nice Groovy-based … Continue reading Jenkins-as-code: job-dsl-plugin