I’m back to Tokyo this and next week, doing all sorts of Jenkins related (and other CloudBees related) activities.
First was the Developer Summit, a two-day developer conference. It covers wide range of topics from mobile to web, agile to industry designs. Yesterday I’ve done a lightening talk, trying to convince them the importance of communicating and sharing (be it code, blog, etc.) The subtext was to do so in English, ideally, so that the rest of the world can see all the great stuff that they are doing, which for me has been a constant struggle in the Jenkins community. During this lightning talk the moderator asked the audience how many of them already use Jenkins, and about 1/3 of the hands went up. Then he asked how many already knew Jenkin, and about another 1/3 went up. So I was quite encouraged.
Today in its 2nd day, I’m doing my high-level Jenkins talk, trying to spread the words and explaining why CI (especially in the context of abidance of computing power) isn’t a transient phenomena, but instead a profound shift in how we develop.
On Tuesday next week, we’ll be doing the 5th Tokyo Jenkins user meetup. Thanks to the usual suspects in the Japanese Jenkins community and a kind offer from Rakuten (a Japanese equivalent of Yahoo, would be the best way to describe this company, I think), this time we’ve got a huge venue, but we’ve already filled up all 110 seats. We have a great speaker line-up, folks from Rakuten and Mixi (a Japanese equivalent of Facebook) discussing how they deploy CI in those large organizations.
I’ve heard from many yesterday that they couldn’t get in because seats are full. In one of those days, I’d really love to bring Jenkins User Conference to Tokyo in some shape. We’ll have to do with a lot less CloudBees involvement (and that means I need to find someone else who can help organize the event, as those things are quite a bit of work), but I think it’d be worth it.
The day after that, I’ll be with Mamezou (whom CloudBees partner with to deliver training in Tokyo) and do a short introductory talk/demo on Jenkins. Whereas the user meetup is more focused on existing users and building relationship among them, this event is more for new users who have no prior experience on Jenkins. Tamagawa-san, who translated “Jenkins the Definitive Guide” to Japanese, would also come to give a presentation.
I’ll have my usual one day training on Thursday, then on Friday I’ll be at the cloud user group meet-up to present about the CloudBees platform.
I’ve brought 300 Jenkins stickers with me, but I’ve already handed out about 50 today, and I’m already regretting that I haven’t brought more. The same goes to business cards — I don’t know what it is but Japanese sure loves exchanging business cards!
In between those I’ve got some company visits and other engagements lined up, and if I get lucky I’ll be meeting&drinking with some old friends. This weekend is likely spent preparing for talks and catching up with work during my Europe trip, but I’ve got the next weekend after all my commitments are done, so I should be able to do some unwinding, too.
All in all, it’s going to be a busy week. My apologies in advance for additional delay in e-mail responses, etc.