As part of SCaLE 15x, I took part in the first Open Source Infra Day where a number of other sysadmins and I shared stories and patterns which have helped us maintain open source infrastructure. As part of the “unconference” tracks, I suggested and then led the session “Running containers in production.” As my luck would have it, in a group of roughly 10 people representing various groups, Jenkins was the only project running production services in containers. I thought I should share what it’s like, and why you should stop standing on the sidelines and give containers in production a try.

Unfortunately the Jenkins project will not be participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2017. While I am disappointed, I am not all that surprised. Last year, our inaugural year in GSoC, was tough insofar that we had to learn many things the hard way, did a poor job of selecting student proposals, and failed to recruit a satisfactory number of mentors.

I have been “farming” for a few years now and as the beginning of the 2017 season in northern California approaches, I wanted to share some advice to consider, regardless of whether you’re a gardener or not.

Most people would consider me to be a nerd. I work in the tech industry, my laptop looks quite non-standard (a stickered Thinkpad), and I tend to travel with suitable amount of electronic kit. Within what I would call “the nerd community,” I sometimes get looks as if I’m especially nerdy. I use a tiling window manager on my Linux desktop, I have strong opinions on free and open source software, and above all else, I use a myriad of “super nerdy” console-only applications like mutt and irssi.

FOSDEM is quite the experience, thousands of geeks running around, dozens of free and open source projects, and plenty of Club-Mate and beer for every attendee to purchase. The weekend is exceptionally busy, and for me, the sleep at night between the chaos is always interesting.

When I first started hacking on what I knew to be called “free and open source software,” I had never met another “hacker” in real life. It felt like a very niche, almost insignificant community until my first FOSDEM in 2006, where for the first time I saw hundreds of free and open source hackers scurrying about. It may have been a niche community existing primarily on IRC and mailing lists, but I finally had proof that there were actual people involved in the endeavor.

The Jenkins project is currently undergoing a major infrastructure migration to Microsoft Azure as our primary infrastructure provider, and as a result, I have been spending a tremendous amount of time getting friendly with Azure tooling.

Earlier this year, 2017, I passed a curious milestone. I have now been blogging on this domain for over a decade. Many of those who know me might have the impression that I’m a fairly honorable and trustworthy individual, making “unethical blogger” a confusing banner to operate under. I suppose I should shed some light on the origins.

I have been a hobby hacker for my entire adult life, and a bit before that too. When your profession is making software, or even making open source software, the joy from hobby-hacking can diminish or even disappear. One of the things I learned from burning out was that, if I am going to continue to enjoy hacking as a personal hobby, I would need to pursue “frivolous hacking.”

Sitting next to me at this high-topped table at Google’s Mountain View campus, a German, sitting across from me, a Pole, and to his left, a hacker from Portugal. With my usual flagrant disregard for the adage “not to discuss politics nor religion in polite company,” I ask some pointed questions about the crises and challenges facing the European Union. It’s October of 2016 and the discussion is about to become heated.