Work

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

Jenkins-as-Code: Creating Jenkins jobs with text, not clicks

By Marc Esher

This is the first in a series of posts on how we upped our Jenkins game by treating Jenkins jobs as code, rather than pointing-and-clicking to create jobs. In this series, I’ll cover: the problems we had as our Jenkins use scaled throughout the organization the target conditions we wished to achieve how we addressed those problems using the job-dsl-plugin along with some sugar on top what the development workflow looks like what a realistic set of jobs looks like for a sample project the sugar we built on top of job-dsl-plugin how we encouraged adoption of this approach across teams … Continue reading Jenkins-as-Code: Creating Jenkins jobs with text, not clicks

2015 Year in review; What’s coming in 2016

By Marc Esher

Before diving head-first in to 2016, I want to look back a year and look forward a bit less than that. It’s said, “The days go by so slowly, and the years go by so fast,” and I see evidence of that when reflecting over a timeline of at least as long as a year This was my 2015: Changes at work Since about mid-2013, at my dayjob I’ve been the nominal, non-supervisory team lead for what was once called our “Release Management” team and is now called “Software Delivery” team. It’s grown considerably since its inception, both in terms … Continue reading 2015 Year in review; What’s coming in 2016

A Learning Approach to processing emails after returning from vacation

By Marc Esher

Anyone who works in an email-reliant organization knows the pain of dealing with emails after a vacation of more than a few days. Hours, perhaps even days, spent dealing with hundreds or thousands of emails that have piled up. Herein, I’ll describe an approach to processing emails with the goals of: Catching up on important decisions Learning about your team Quickly moving on to more important work Most email is time-sensitive and will be irrelevant by the time you read it after vacation. Spending hours or days trying to catch up is a fool’s errand, prompted primarily by Fear of Missing Out … Continue reading A Learning Approach to processing emails after returning from vacation

On 18F: past and future

By Marc Esher

Disclosures: at the time of this writing 1) I work for the U.S. federal government. 2) several former colleagues currently work at 18F 3) my perspectives are decidedly civil and not defense 18F is a digital services delivery team within the U.S. federal government General Services Administration (GSA), recently celebrating its 1 year anniversary. Since inception, it’s created or strongly promoted several public applications and initiatives, including Hub, Midas, Analytics, HTTPS initiative, and much more. 18F publicizes its project statuses on a dashboard. I know first hand how hard it can be to get things done in federal government IT, and … Continue reading On 18F: past and future