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Meet Vatsal Verma – GSoC 2026 Contributor Working on Retooling Jenkins.io Web Success Stories

Vatsal Verma
Vatsal Verma May 24, 2026 ⏱︎ 4 min read

Hello everyone!

I’m Vatsal Verma, a final-year student and a Google Summer of Code 2026 contributor with Jenkins. This summer, I’ll be working on Retool jenkins.io website Success Stories which aims to modernize the tech stack, improving the submission workflow, and enhancing the overall UI/UX experience of the website.

Project Description

This project aims to migrate the Jenkins.io Success Stories website from Gatsby to Vite, enabling faster builds, improved developer experience, and better performance. It focuses on modernizing the UI/UX with a responsive, accessible, and user-centric design. A key objective is redesigning the story submission workflow by moving from Decap/Netlify CMS to a GitHub Actions–based workflow, allowing structured, automated, and scalable content contributions.

This transition will also involve refining and standardizing YAML-based content files for better consistency, validation, and maintainability. Overall, the project enhances performance, scalability, and contributor experience while aligning the platform with modern web development practices.

What I did in the Community Bonding Period?

  • Joined the Jenkins GSoC onboarding and introductory call with mentors and organization admins.

  • Attended mentor meetings to discuss project scope, ideas, and implementation plans.

  • Set up the local development environment by forking the jenkins-infra/stories repository and configuring a dedicated gsoc-2026-revamp branch for development.

  • Discussed the story submission workflow and GitHub Actions-based approach for handling user-story submissions.

  • Designed and proposed a new UI for the project, collected mentor feedback, and iterated on the designs accordingly.

  • Explored the integration of the Vite SSG plugin in the project to improve performance, scalability, and static page generation for story routes.

What lies ahead (Coding Period)?

  • Begin the migration of the stories.jenkins.io platform from Gatsby to a Vite + React based architecture to improve maintainability, performance, and developer experience.

  • Refactor existing components and routing logic while replacing Gatsby-specific APIs and the GraphQL data layer with a lightweight YAML/JSON based approach.

  • Work on refining and standardizing the YAML structure used across existing stories to improve consistency and maintainability.

  • Design and implement the new story submission workflow, including a guided submission interface, live YAML preview, and automated GitHub Actions based processing.

  • Continue iterating on the proposed UI/UX redesign for the platform, focusing on responsiveness, accessibility, filtering, navigation, and overall user experience.

  • Add and improve repository tooling, including ESLint, Prettier, CI workflows, validation checks, and contributor-focused documentation to ensure long-term maintainability.

Future Plans

My future plans are to continue contributing to Jenkins and stay actively engaged with the community. I also want to help new contributors get started with this organization and open source in general. Being part of this community has taught me a lot, and I believe there is still so much more to learn and explore.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my mentors, Kris Stern, Rajiv Singh, Chamod Shehanka Perera, and the community for giving me this opportunity. I am excited to learn, contribute, and share my experience with others.

Follow Along

You can contact me:

Excited to contribute to Jenkins and collaborate with the community throughout the summer!

About the author

Vatsal Verma

Vatsal Verma

Vatsal Verma is a final-year Computer Science student and an open-source contributor with a strong interest in web technologies and community-driven development. He has experience in Java, JavaScript, and frameworks such as Spring Boot, along with frontend development. Apart from programming, he is also passionate about graphic design and enjoys creating visual content for technical communities. In 2026, he was selected as a Google Summer of Code contributor under Jenkins, where he is working Retool jenkins.io website Success Stories project.