How Hudson and Jenkins happened

An airhacks.fm conversation with Kohsuke Kawaguchi (@kohsukekawa) about: running Family BASIC on Nintendo, learning C++, building abstractions, growing up in Tokyo, a Japanese keyboard, selling shareware programs in high school, writing a Text file viewer, earning 5k per month as a kid, PCs stores in Tokyo, learning chinese, Japanese vs. Chinese characters, building software at university, building an XML editor for XSL, reverse transformation from XHTML to XML, XML schema was lacking mathematical elegance, starting at Sun Microsystems in California, Sun didn't liked SOAP, starting at J2EE / Java EE team, working with James Clark on RelaxNG at Sun Microsystems, implementing Java Architecture for XML Binding / JAXB, Java Project Adelard, Java and XML the evil book at JavaOne, YAML vs. XML, using JAXB for generating JSON, working long hours in Tokyo, working times at Sun Microsystems were almost vacations, being a build breaker, getting the idea for Hudson, Hudson started as a leisure project, Hudson - an executable WAR, Hudson was based on the winstone servlet engine, winstone is embeddable, Hudson installation and administration was easy, software was like another person in the team, Hudson was like a British buttler, writing args4j, writing hk2, exploring native Java integration capabilities, working partially at Glassfish team, being part of Oracle, the forgotten developer at Oracle, forking Hudson to Jenkins, large corporations are not always rational, leaving Oracle and joining CloudBees, becoming a CEO of launchable, starting launchable, the confidence in code changes, using ML to sort tests, GraalVM can run Python, Ruby is popular in Japan, Kohsuke Kawaguchi on twitter: @kohsukekawa, Kohsuke on Wikipedia, and Kohsuke's website