There are a lot of Jenkins plugins. Some still shine. Others… reek of Java 8 and long-forgotten dependencies. What if you could modernize them without sacrificing your weekend to digital archaeology?
Welcome to the age of Plugin Modernizer — a tool powered by OpenRewrite and fueled by the collective dream of never manually migrating anything again. We're talking Java 11, 17, 21, and soon 25; Spring Security replacing Acegi (yes, it's still around); and JUnit 5 gently escorting JUnit 4 into retirement. All of it driven by handcrafted automation rules, CI pipelines, and a horde of bots that never sleep.
This talk tells the (almost) heroic tale of a small group of contributors, born from a GSoC idea, who dared to ask: what if we fixed Jenkins plugins instead of letting them quietly rot under a pile of tech debt? Hundreds of plugins have already been refreshed. Even better: the project reignited community contributions by lowering the barrier — no need to decipher legacy code before your first cup of coffee.
Come for the scripts. Stay for the open source that breathes and auto-upgrades. Leave inspired to automate your own maintenance nightmares.