Jenkins is a popular open-source automation server that enables developers to reliably build, test, and deploy their software. It's like having a personal assistant that does all the tedious integration work for you, so you can focus on writing code and shipping features instead of fiddling with infrastructure.

How to use it in a sentence

• I was going to push that new feature to production tonight, but Jenkins is acting up again and I don't have time to debug it. Guess it'll have to wait until tomorrow.

• Did you see the new Jenkins plugin that just dropped? It's supposed to make our lives easier, but I bet it'll just break everything and send us back to the stone age of manual testing.

If you actually want to learn more...

• Martin Fowler's article on Continuous Integration is a classic that covers the fundamentals of CI and how tools like Jenkins enable the practice. It's a bit dated but the core concepts still apply.

• Jocelyn Harper gave an insightful talk at DevOpsDays Philadelphia about how her team uses Jenkins to streamline their development workflow. She shares some practical tips and lessons learned from using Jenkins in the real world.

• For a deeper dive, check out Jez Humble's book Continuous Delivery which has a whole chapter dedicated to Jenkins and CI best practices. Jez is one of the OG DevOps gurus and really knows his stuff.

Note: the Developer Dictionary is in Beta. Please direct feedback to skye@statsig.com.