 When discussing something as big and ambitious as a DevOps platform, it is easy to focus on equally big and ambitious goals. And we will, but it is just as important to look at how a platform can help us with the day-to-day fundamentals of work. At its core, DevOps is really about working together. So there's nothing more fundamental than collaboration to DevOps. And that is why I'm so excited for our next speaker. Gediarao will share her story about why collaboration is particularly important in the tech industry, how her company used the GitLab platform to maintain their culture of collaboration as they shifted to remote work during the pandemic and how they did so without sacrificing security or accountability along the way. Let's take a look. Good morning, good afternoon, good night everyone. I understand that we're all tuning in from different parts of the world. So I wouldn't want to miss out on any time of day. So I love tech events, I love conferences and I'm really grateful for such opportunities to come and give content. At times I'm usually the receiver and at times I'm usually just the networker where I get to meet different people, I get to interact. So I love how these conferences and these events bring a kind of cohesiveness when it comes to diversity, when it comes to networking and I'm forever grateful for such events. So thank you so much, GitLab, comment. So I believe introductions are in order. My name is Gediarao. I mostly go by the alias getting or to get through. This is specifically for my Kenyan friends who usually think that my name is a short form for something. So they looked for the something and figured out it should be get through. But who's complaining? I'm born, sorry, and bred in Kenya. I have lived in Kenya my whole life, still living in Kenya, such a beautiful country. I currently work back and forth. Sokowatch is a company based in Nairobi, Kenya that works mostly with green e-commerce to informal retailers. I have two very awesome communities that I'm passionate about. That's called Get Geeky in the Lixar Beam Africa. I should drop you the links once I'm through. You can catch me at GitLab, catch me on Twitter with the handle at Gediarao. So let's just dive right in. So my session title today is the pandemic can stop us innovating and collaborating through disruption. So why is collaboration so important to us? So when I talk about us, I'm generally talking about anyone that identifies as being in the tech industry. Is it an engineer? Is it a product manager? Is it DevOps? So why is the environment that we work in as developers or as product managers demand such a high dose of collaboration? So I'll tell you why. The reason why companies don't have just one person working the entire tech team is because we all believe that collaboration is that ingredient that actually gets things done. So this just means decisions you make, any perspective that you had is somehow influenced by your teammates, which is good because it brings some kind of diversity when it comes to perspectives and ideas. So the social aspect of collaboration is what stands out for all this. We need to grow together. We need to have fun together while working. It doesn't necessarily have to be as serious as working. And that's why collaboration is very, very important for each and every one of us. So whenever we see this icon, I bet that we could all identify with this. Coronavirus or COVID-19 hit us all really bad. When I say hit, we mean that it affected us in very many and various aspects of our lives. It could be that you lost someone to COVID. It could be that you did contract the COVID virus. It could be that you lost your job. It could be that your job shifted from one paradigm to the other. So this is what we're going to be talking about the last point really. So in my company, we had to make this transition. So most, I could say almost all tech companies had to adapt in order to just keep everything moving. We had to make the transition of going from a physical setup to a remote setup. So most of everything we had to do when we were working in person or working physically, we now had to do virtually, we now had to do remotely. So for companies that were remote at first or were remote ever since, I guess the transition was quite smooth because their work cultures weren't affected that much. But take into consideration someone as myself who has worked physically my entire life. And we have to just switch immediately to working remotely or working virtually. It does take a toll on some of us, but merely depends on how sudden the change was. Was the change immediate or did we have time to transition? So the kind of challenges that we faced as a team during the transition is how do we ensure that the information that we have in-house is confidential? We're working on a remote kind of model. So how do we ensure nothing leaks out? Nothing that is internal leaks out. So how do we continue cultivating a collaborative culture? In the office, you would walk to someone and ask about a bug or you would call someone up to help you fix something. So how do we continue collaborating beyond this? How do we continue doing this virtually? Maintaining social interactions through working remotely? Are we still going to be friends? Are we still going to have that bond as friends? And also developing new work routines. This just means I'm working from home. Is there going to be that work and life balance? Is there going to be that kind of discipline that we need when we're working? So a lot of factors did really affect this. So I'm now going to talk about GitLab beyond COVID. How did GitLab come to the rescue? Or how did GitLab come through for us? And the reason why I'm actually giving this talk. So what do we use GitLab for? So for GitLab, it has proven to be a tool, a very, very important and efficient tool. Kindly note, it's not that we didn't use GitLab before the pandemic. It's not that the pandemic hit and then we were like, oh, GitLab? No, we used GitLab before. But when the pandemic hit, this is when we actually started discovering new features and actual features that would work for us in working remotely. So an example of what GitLab offered us was the fashion control part of it. So for fashion control, we were assured of security. Like having a private repository set up on GitLab and allowing only designated maintainers or developers to access it at a time proved as a really, really heartwarming security for us because we were sure that all our environment variables are safe, all our code are safe. The other thing would be the backup and the reference. Anytime that I would lose my code locally, I would just immediately know that I have a place where I could find it. That assurance really works for us, especially when you're working remotely. When you can't get your code from the next person close to you, but you know and you're assured that you can always get a backup of what you pushed. The last bit is the accountability part. When I talk about accountability, this is simply I could do something as simple as navigating through the merge requests or the issues either closed or open and identify when exactly the change in the system was made. Who made it? Why was it made? So every team member has a form of accountability for each and everything that they do. And that is very important in a team. So fashion control is amazing for remote working and having embraced it earlier in our, before when I joined my company, I found the using Russian control, which was awesome. So having embraced that earlier, made us vividly view this as an ultimate efficiency within this pandemic. It was just an extension of, hey, this is definitely working for us because we did use it before, right? So the other part that would really play a really big role, that kid lab has played a big role for us is the collaboration part. When I talk about collaboration, there are very many Kanban boards actually that can be used when you talk about issues, right? Although we use this extensively while working in the personal setup. However, when we transitioned into remote working, we found that working with kid lab issues and tickets quite efficient. This is because we have all this issue, issue trackers and our code all in one roof. And we really, really embraced this more while we did than we did in our in-person working culture. I'm not saying that the Kanban boards are bad. I'm just saying we as a company tend to embrace this more as our working culture. Yeah, so a template could assign a ticket to any of the members. Each issue was just created using an issue template. So then an issue template that goes for each issue where we just figured it would be nice for the format if all the issue formats could look the same, right? Yeah, so we categorize all the issues into epics where we can identify what epic it fits into as well as any linked issues that could fit in with the same issue. So that when we're working on the issue and you need to add a couple of sub-issues, that's what some of us call it, sub-issues. You can also link it to that issue. You can place labels if you need to. You can discard, you can block, you can hold. And those are just some of the amazing things, sorry, that we had with kid lab. We also had the magic requests packs. Magic quests were handled in a very, very interesting way. So we create and we merge requests per given issue or tickets that Intel creates a feature branch for us to work with. So magic requests also have a certain template that they should all comply with. They can also contain labels to identify it and can also specify a specific milestone in which our case we call sprints where we give a specific timeline in which this feature or bug is to be completed. Notice that every ticket, every issue that is created needs to have an estimate, yeah, great. So just a brief on our workflow as I finish up, our workflow now isn't as different from when we worked in person. The transition did take a toll on us for a few days, maybe weeks, but once we had the workflow all set up, we were good to go. So once the ticket is set up, we would receive a notification. Once we receive a notification, you know that you can start working on your ticket as long as it is within the milestone on which our case it was within the sprint. Take up an issue, but once you take up an issue, we know that a developer taking up an issue makes you responsible for creating the magic request, developing the feature, could be a bug, seeking reviewer, structurally reviewer code, and approve as well before we merge it in. So our workflow is not as different as it was in the in-person setup, but we did enjoy working remotely because the collaboration was just top notch. We thought we would lose the bond. We thought we would lose everything in all this, but it just continued being very efficient. And I greatly, greatly think it was because we had leads who are able to take that up and actually build environment for us. So a few lessons I learned from this. Collaboration doesn't necessarily have to be physical. As we head out of the COVID phase, we still need to be resilient. We still need to think outside the box. What if we have to work remotely again? Do we have the room to smoothly transition into it? At this point, yes, because we all know that it's possible. We know that we need to make the most of the tools that we already have, for instance, GitLab, in this case. And once we maximize on this, working remotely and in person can be very similar for tech teams. So the lesson I got from this is that we need to ultimately make good use of collaboration tools, regardless of the work culture so we can equip ourselves for future disruptions. Thank you so much. That is the end of my talk, sadly. I have had really so much fun doing this. And I hope some of you have come out with something substantial from this. Thank you so much. Please catch me on Twitter at Gete O'Rourke. I'm very nice. I will answer your DMs. And thank you so much.