GlassFish is launching the "GlassFish Award Program", and Hudson is a part of this program.

What that means is that you can do some of the followings and you could win cold hard cash! And I'm talking about a lot of money here, in the order of thousands.

1. Report bugs to Hudson. If I understand the rules correctly, the top-three great bug reports in Hudson will each get roughly $2500, at the end of July 2008.
2. Make contributions to Hudson. This is rather open-ended, but for example, it could be one of the followings. The winners will be chosen from all the GlassFish projects, unlike the bug report prizes, but the first prize is $20000, the second/third prize is $10000, and 20 base prizes are each $4000.
   • Develop a convincing Hudson plugin that does something new
   • Write documentation (or better yet, how about a book!)
   • Localization
   • Develop/enhance IDE plugins for Hudson (we have ones for all major IDEs but I think they could all use some help.)
   • Develop tools that work with Hudson, like this or this.

I couldn't find this in the contest rules, but I believe the enhancements to existing plugins and tools would still count, and they'd be judged based on the delta improvements during the contest term, so if you have already developed a Hudson plugin, you still have a good chance of winning.

If you are interested in contributing but don't know where to start, look for the issues with 'introductory' status, as those are particularly suited for people who'd like to ramp up. The "extend Hudson" page and in particular the plugin tutorial should be helpful.

If you are more ambitious and willing to attack something substantially bigger, here are some of the random ideas that might get your brain start thinking:

1. Hudson and cloud computing. Wouldn't it be cool if you can run a build/test cluster on platforms like SunGrid or Amazon EC2? You can get as much computing resources as you need, just when you need it.
2. Hudson and virtualization. Often you need to run tests in different environments, but keeping those environments on bare metal is not very efficient for provisioning. This is bit like the above, but wouldn't it be nice if Hudson could work with virtualization software and start/stop slaves in the right architecture, just when they are needed?
3. Personalization. Now that some basic security infrastructure is place, expand that to better handle personalization. Let the user choose what to display in their top page, or how they'd receive notifications. Display time stamp in the user's time zone, etc.
4. Update center. Let Hudson installations talk to the central server to discover plugin updates and automate update processes. It has a lot of other potentials, like simplifying the bug reporting.
5. More intelligence. Hudson gets a lot of data. Can it be used for something more sophisticated? For example, can we correlate test regressions with changes and bug ids to create a "working set", like Mylyn does? Can't we closely integrate with IDEs to make those information seamlessly available to developers?

Anyway, I hope this gets you interested. For more details, see the GAP page and Sun's community innovation awards program, of which GAP is a part of.