Hudson’s Secret: Kohsuke | Hacker News Reader

Hudson’s Secret: Kohsuke

pelegri.wordpress.com

59 pointsbensummers10 comments

I worked with Eduardo (the author of the post) at Sun and I can tell you that when he says that Kohsuke is among the top 3-5 engineers that he has worked with, that REALLY says something.

Eduardo was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun and as such, he worked with Sun's top engineers. He was also a senior technical member of the team that created JavaEE.

Having met Kohsuke at various Hudson meetups, and worked with the Hudson code somewhat, I can definitely attest to him being the smartest coder I've interacted with.

He's not just a productivity dynamo, but he's just a great coder. This was exemplified when I idly mentioned in the IRC channel "it would be pretty great if there was a way to unit test my plugin." About 10 minutes later, Kohsuke responds with "well, there is. There's a test harness I wrote." The test harness is a thing of beauty, spawning a headless, up-to-date version of Hudson that allows all sorts of querying about its operation. I'd never worked with something quite as amazing.

Kohsuke == Hudson. Hudson without Kohsuke is essentially just an historial artifact. Oracle stands to lose much more from a potential fork than they realize.

EDIT: The man also has the patience of a saint, which cannot be overstated when it comes to support.

InfraDNA http://infradna.com/about is the company Kohsuke founded to offer professional support for Hudson.

On a related note, here's an interesting article about Hudson's development infrastructure and Oracle's attempts to keep the project on java.net:

http://www.hudson-labs.org/content/whos-driving-thing

HN discussion from earlier this week: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1954180

Whoops! Must have missed that.

Also, Kohsuke's blog is full of little gems and code snippets:

http://kohsuke.org/ http://www.java.net/blogs/kohsuke/

A good example would be Akuma: his embeddable UNIX daemonization library that he wrote for hudson to use:

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/kohsuke/archive/2009/01/writing...

Hudson is great. It's one of the few open source CI servers (that I know of) which can be configured without mucking about with reams of config files.

I recently setup Hudson for the first time and was amazed that it just worked!

Hudson is an amazing tool and Kohsuke deserves all the praise he gets.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com