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GSoC 2026 final term - Retooling Jenkins.io Web Success Stories

Vatsal Verma
Vatsal Verma August 22, 2026 ⏱︎ 5 min read

Jenkins GSoC 2026 Program

Hello everyone!

This post marks the successful completion of my Google Summer of Code 2026 Retool jenkins.io website Success Stories project. The project focused on modernizing the Jenkins Success Stories website by migrating it from Gatsby to Vite, improving performance, streamlining the story submission workflow, and enhancing the overall user experience.

It has been an incredible learning experience, and I’m grateful to the Jenkins community and my mentors for their guidance, feedback, and support throughout the project.

For a detailed overview, please refer to the project page.

Table of Contents

  1. About the Project

  2. Progress till Midterm

    1. Application Migration

    2. YAML Refinement and Validation

  3. Progress After Midterm

    1. Story Submission

    2. UI/UX Redesign

    3. Code Quality & Tooling

  4. What I’ve Learned?

  5. Acknowledgements

About the Project

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, 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.

project repository: Jenkins Success Stories.

Progress till Midterm

By midterm, the project had made significant progress in two key areas: application migration and Success Stories data quality.

Application Migration

  • Migrated the application from Gatsby to Vite.

  • Replaced GraphQL with YAML-based data loading.

  • Added SSG, dynamic routing, and Leaflet map support.

YAML Refinement and Validation

  • Cleaned and standardized all 194 YAML files.

  • Added yamllint for structural checks.

  • Added AJV schema validation for consistent data.

Progress After Midterm

After the midterm, the project focused on completing the story submission workflow, modernizing the UI/UX, and strengthening code quality and project tooling. These improvements made the platform easier to use, more maintainable, and more efficient for both contributors and maintainers.

Story Submission

  • Integrated Decap CMS to provide a user-friendly interface for submitting Success Stories.

  • Added GitHub OAuth authentication and a workflow to automatically generate PRs from submissions (already OAuth configured for stories.jenkins.io).

  • Improved the submission process with form validation and automated story generation.

story workflow

The new story submission workflow uses Decap CMS to provide a simple form-based interface for contributors. After signing in through GitHub OAuth, contributors fill out the story form, which generates the required story data and automatically creates a Pull Request in the repository for maintainers to review.

UI/UX Redesign

  • Redesigned the Success Stories interface with a modern and cleaner user experience.

  • Improved navigation, story discovery, stories pages, and responsive layouts.

  • Enhanced overall visual consistency, accessibility, and usability.

Code Quality & Tooling

Improved the project’s development workflow by adding tool version management, Prettier, and additional GitHub Actions. These changes helped standardize the development environment, maintain consistent code formatting, and automate important checks across the project.

What I’ve Learned?

This project has been a valuable learning experience, both technically and personally. Working on the migration from Gatsby to Vite, improving the data pipeline, and building the new story submission workflow gave me hands-on experience with SSG, routing, data management, performance, CI/CD, and open source tooling.

Beyond the technical aspects, working with the Jenkins community and my mentors helped me improve how I approach problems, write maintainable code, and collaborate through reviews and discussions. The continuous feedback and guidance have contributed greatly to my growth as a developer and open source contributor.

Acknowledgements

I would like to sincerely thank my mentors, Kris Stern, Rajiv Singh, Chamod Shehanka Perera, for their continuous guidance, valuable feedback, and support throughout the project. I am also grateful to the Jenkins community and GSoC organizers for providing me with this opportunity to learn, contribute, and grow through open source.

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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.