Introducing Maeve Ho – GSoC 2025 Contributor Enhancing Tekton Integration in Jenkins

Maeve Ho June 4, 2025

Jenkins GSoC

Hi everyone! 👋

I’m Maeve Ho, a GSoC 2025 contributor working with the Jenkins community to enhance the Tekton Client Plugin. My project focuses on delivering full CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) capabilities for Tekton resources from within Jenkins — a step forward in unifying Jenkins pipelines with Kubernetes-native CI/CD automation.

Project Description

Tekton is a powerful framework for cloud-native CI/CD, but Jenkins users currently face limitations when managing Tekton resources — only basic creation and deletion are supported. My goal is to fill that gap by implementing full lifecycle operations, enabling Jenkins to interact deeply with:

Tasks and ClusterTasks
Pipelines
PipelineRuns and TaskRuns
Triggers, TriggerBindings, and TriggerTemplates

These enhancements will allow teams to visualize, modify, and automate Tekton workflows directly in Jenkins, helping reduce tool fragmentation and streamline Kubernetes CI/CD adoption.

Community Bonding Period Works

The community bonding phase gave me a valuable opportunity to understand the ecosystem and set a strong technical foundation. I:

Set up a local Jenkins + Minikube environment for full-stack plugin testing.
Explored the current plugin codebase and documented its architecture.
Reviewed Kubernetes client methods and Tekton CRD structures.
Collaborated with mentors (@krisstern, @gounthar, @waveywaves) to finalize feature scope and workflow design.
Drafted a comprehensive technical plan outlining the API extensions, validation logic, and Jenkins pipeline step design.
Opened #390 to upgrade the plugin to Java 17 and Jenkins 2.492.3, resolving Maven enforcer violations, removing legacy dependencies, and verifying runtime compatibility via mvn hpi:run and Jenkins UI.
Ran successful builds and confirmed .hpi generation; currently triaging 9 failing tests and reviewing CI failures (SpotBugs, Javadoc, junit).

These early efforts ensure that the coding phase starts with clarity and purpose.

My GSoC Coding Period Goals

Throughout the summer, my deliverables will include:

Fully functional CRUD methods for Tekton resources with type-safe model classes.
Read and update logic using Kubernetes API conventions (GET, PATCH, etc.).
Secure integration with Jenkins credentials for Kubernetes auth.
YAML/JSON parsing and serialization support for Tekton resource specs.
Jenkins pipeline steps (e.g. tektonRead, tektonUpdate) exposed via DSL.
Unit and integration tests against a local Kubernetes cluster.
Example pipelines and user documentation to guide adoption.

These improvements aim to make Jenkins a more powerful tool in Kubernetes-native CI/CD environments, where teams often rely on both Jenkins and Tekton together.

Future Plan

After GSoC, I plan to stay active in the Jenkins community — maintaining the Tekton Client Plugin, addressing user feedback, and possibly extending the plugin with user interface features like visual task/pipeline run inspectors.

Background

I’m currently studying Computer Science at Lehigh University, Pennsylvania, US. My past experience includes:

Deploying CI/CD pipelines with Jenkins and Kubernetes at VNPT.
Designing high-throughput data pipelines and HPC workflows using SLURM.
Developing REST APIs with strong error handling and credential isolation.
Building open-source projects involving AI, vector search, and caching systems.

I enjoy projects at the intersection of infrastructure, cloud-native tooling, and developer experience — and this GSoC project is the perfect fit.

Acknowledgements

Huge thanks to my mentors – @krisstern, @gounthar, and @waveywaves – for their clear guidance, timely feedback, and thoughtful technical advice. I also appreciate the support from the Jenkins GSoC admin team and wider community for making this program welcoming and impactful.

Follow Along

I maintain a public work log documenting technical notes, progress milestones, and debugging steps throughoaut the project here:

HackMD Project Log

Contact me:

I’m excited to keep learning and building with you all this summer!

About the author

Maeve Ho

Maeve is currently pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at Lehigh University. With hands-on experience in Kubernetes, CI/CD, and plugin development, she has contributed to large-scale cloud-native workflows and high-performance computing systems.

In 2025, Maeve was selected as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) contributor for the Jenkins project, focusing on enhancing the Tekton Client Plugin by implementing full CRUD support for Tekton resources within Jenkins.

Outside of open-source work, she has interned at VNPT and conducted research at Lehigh’s NANO Lab. Maeve is passionate about bridging traditional CI/CD tools with modern Kubernetes-native solutions.