 Jamie Rochelle from GitLab's Community Relations Team is here to moderate a conversation with some of GitLab's most active community members, the GitLab heroes. I helped start this program in 2019 and in the last two years more than 90 members have joined the program due to their outstanding contributions to GitLab. These contributions range from contributing codes to organizing meetups to speaking at events including past GitLab Commits. As a member of the GitLab community, there is a good chance that you've benefited either directly or indirectly from the work of the GitLab heroes. I'm so excited that we have some of them here today to share their stories with you. Enjoy. So thank you for joining the talk Heroes Unmasked, a conversation with our GitLab heroes. This will give you an intimate insight to the heroes program directly from our heroes. So today, I will be your moderator and I'm the evangelism program with GitLab. I assist and manage the meetup programs globally as well as the heroes program. And if you want to get in contact with me, my GitLab handle in Twitter are below as well. Now I'm going to kick it off to Abel so he can introduce himself. Yeah, thanks, Jamie. Hi, everyone. My name is Abel Ayubawa. I am a GitLab hero. I'm also a founder of a company called Softroom where we build innovative products and launch the market. I personally love networking and meeting new people. Yeah, that's me. Thank you. Thank you, Abel. Now I'm going to hand it over to Vlad. Thanks, Jamie. And hello, everyone. My name is Vladimir. I'm based in Brisbane, Australia and I run my own company called Tomato Elephant Studio where we do open-source consultancy and build software products. I've been a GitLab hero for about two years. I'm really enjoying being part of the program. Apart from that, I'm also part of other open-source communities such as Bootstrap and Drupal. Awesome. Mario, you want to give your intro? Thanks, Jamie. Hi, everyone. I'm Mario Garcia from Mexico. I've been an open-source contributor for more than a decade and also a speaker for the same time. I joined the heroes program three years ago this month and now I'm doing an internship at TerminusDB. Awesome. And congratulations on your internship as well. So now that we've, you've met a few of our heroes, I'll give you a brief overview about what the hero program really entails. So here at GitLab, we believe everyone can contribute, meaning everyone can become a hero. Currently, we have 94 heroes globally, which is amazing as I just received more applications today. And our key attributes are someone who possesses a passion for GitLab, DevSecOps and also open-source software, aspiring to uphold our missions and values. We also want to make sure that folks who are heroes are contributing and not just in code, organizing meetups and other, going to conferences and talking on our behalf as well, just advocating for GitLab in general. And if you see this QR code, this allows you to, it'll take you directly to our homepage where if you are interested in becoming a hero, you'll find the application there and a lot more details about the program as well. So let's get started. Are you guys ready for this conversation? Question one, I'm gonna kick this off to Vlad and then the rest of the heroes will follow. How did you first get involved with GitLab? What promoted you to join the heroes program? I started teaching the open-source product to the public about 2013 and that was Drupal the technology I was very interested in back then. So it's a content management system. And year after year, I started seeing that I needed some other technology that would help me to teach people and give them a bit more streamlined approach to actually how to learn different things. I'm not gonna go into details but eventually I found the GitLab first through the job at about 2016 to 2017 and then eventually I started using different GitLab features and they helped me to bring different aspects and features of the GitLab to my training, primarily Drupal first but lately in the last three or four years I also switched off and do some pure GitLab training as well. So it came from my work to answer your question first, to answer your question first. It came from my work first and then really incorporated in the public training I'm doing. So that's how I started with GitLab. Awesome, thank you and we're really appreciative about going out and teaching as well. Mario, do you wanna let folks know how you first got involved with GitLab and what prompted you to join the heroes program? Yeah, well I just started using GitLab back in 2018 and a year later I got interested in continuous integration and I really wanted to start with this topic and I just started learning about it and using GitLab CI for that and I tried to document everything that I was learning then I heard about the GitLab heroes program and applied that same year and since that I've been active participating in community activities and writing about. Thank you Mario. Able, would you like to share about how you first got involved with GitLab as well? Yeah, sure. So I started using GitLab in 2017 when I recently joined the tech industry. So I started using GitLab as a 100 developer pushing codes and maintaining remote repositories there. Now going down to 2019 when I started Softrum as well as started building the tech community here in Africa I saw the GitLab hero program as an opportunity to kind of take that to the next level where I get to advocate and teach people on open sourcing and how they can equally contribute to the tech ecosystem. So basically that's how I got to the GitLab hero program and how I started using GitLab as a product itself. Awesome, I love the diversity that everyone learned GitLab or came across GitLab in so many different ways. So thank you for sharing. So the next question, what does being a GitLab hero mean to you? Mario, do you want to start us off? Yeah, well, this is an interesting question and I've written about it but I think about to answer this question, not only having the opportunity to learn more about how to use GitLab within different kind of technologies and for different kind of projects but the idea of having the opportunity to share with the community the things that I've learned about GitLab and have the support from community, from team members and also get involved with organizing activities for the community. I think that's what being a GitLab hero means to me. Thank you for that because that also upholds one of our values which is collaboration, right? Able, do you want to share what being a GitLab hero means to you? Yeah, sure. Okay, so for me personally, I see myself as a GitLab hero based on two factors or rather pillars I like love to refer to. So the first is community and the second is collaboration. I personally believe in collaboration and I feel being a GitLab hero gives you that opportunity to build a better community around you, to be able to be that community part to a lot of open sources out there as well as tech enthusiasts, be it beginners or experts, you are there to help them in their own journey as well as building a stronger community around you. For me, that's being a GitLab hero. Thank you. Vlad, would you like to chime in on this one? Sure. It's kind of an interesting story because I started my company in 2017 after working about 15 years in the industry for different consultancy companies and big tech. I started working remotely and then I started reading a lot of articles about working remotely and GitLab was definitely pioneering the area of working remotely. We're talking about 2017, so obviously offices, especially here in Australia, well-dominated environment even for IT industry and being an ITO, we thought the idea of actually taking your laptop and going somewhere and working from anywhere was kind of a dream come true. So when I started my company, I thought, oh, I want to research the topic. So I read a lot and I saw that GitLab is definitely pushing the topic of remote work and collaboration and open source, everything I was passionate about really far and really started getting into community. So I thought it would be interesting to see it on the inside. So I actually applied for one of the positions and at that time, GitLab was growing exponentially. I didn't even get reply from my resume part that it's been unsuccessful, but then I thought, well, I'm sure there is other way apart from contributing code and trying to apply for a job within GitLab and I saw GitLab Hero Program and I thought, oh, that's great because it can give me an insight of what's happening in GitLab and how they operate, communicate, and bringing on values as well as pushing so much stuff, open source, as well as feeling part of the GitLab, but also getting a bit closer and learning from the people who are running the program and who are part of the program and I never were disappointed that it gave me insights and so many people's life will actually use GitLab Day-to-Day as well as work for GitLab. Awesome. Thank you guys for those answers. On to the next question. What is your most important contribution as a member of the GitLab community? Vlad, do you want to kick this one off? As I teach a lot, I always appreciate when people come back to me and say, hey, I start using GitLab feature here or GitLab feature here. I think that's the most kind of freshest contribution when you actually, whatever you teach or whatever you teach your team or show your team comes back to you and because that's how I started with GitLab, I was using a competition product for a number of companies to enter a GitLab until one of my colleagues actually show me a GitLab and say, hey, you can do those things much faster and this is how I was introduced to CI CD as well. So that opened a completely different world to me in terms of how you can build, deliver, test the project and without worrying and doing it manually. So for me, the biggest contribution is when someone comes back and say, hey, I implemented this feature using GitLab. So that's, yeah, I think that would be it for me. Thank you. And Mario, how about you? Well, I think that would be related with sharing knowledge. I mean, since I joined the program three years ago, I've been writing about the things I've learned about GitLab and especially how to use GitLab CI with different technologies and also having the opportunity to speak at some conferences and share that knowledge. And well, I continuously try different, well, GitLab CI with different projects and I really like, share what I've learned and document through doc posts what I've been doing with GitLab. Thank you. And we truly appreciate all your contributions as well. How about you, Abel? Yeah. Okay. For me, I will say the growth process of the community itself, because when you probably let's say you host an event, you show people how easy it is to contribute to the open source community, how to use GitLab and all of that. And you have that feedback afterwards, people messaging you like, hi, Abel, this is really cool to use. We've seen how easy it is to contribute to the open source community and how they generally just enjoy and continue to grow. I think that's it for me. Awesome. We're going to keep the conversation going and jump over to the next question. And what advice would you give to people who are thinking of contributing but haven't yet? You know, some folks are a little hesitant to contribute or even use GitLab. So what are some advice that you all will share with those folks? Next off, I will say you should first be confident in yourself when I say confident is when you speak with a lot of people that haven't really contributed to the open source community, what they usually tell you is how do I contribute, what can I contribute? And they keep on giving excuses like, okay, I don't know how to code or I don't know how to do this and that. So for someone to easily do that, he can easily contribute to the open source community regardless of you being a coder or a software engineer with the little knowledge you have, you can go ahead and contribute. You can see people contribute to huge open source projects through probably the documentations or other little things that people kind of overlook. So people can generally start from there and over time you can get better and, you know, grow to being better open source contributors. Thank you, Mario. Advice, please. Yeah, something I've learned from contributing to open source is that you don't need a technical background for a start contributing to a project. If you really would like to learn new stuff, this could be an opportunity for that and, well, don't hesitate to ask community members for help. I mean, I think that's one of the reasons why I joined the open source movement at first. Thank you. I'm actually taking his advice as well because I'm considered probably non-technical as well and sometimes I have hesitation to contribute or jump into doing MRs and all those different things as well. So, Vlad, what advice would you share? As I mentioned before, I've been also part of the Drupal community for quite a while for more than 10 years and it took me a while to start contributing back to open source. It was mixed of things, but I didn't know where to start, although there were training, I never could finish. For example, there was a hackathon, I couldn't finish the patches I started or it never got anywhere. So, eventually, I got to the formula where you need to build something for yourself. So, you have this small project idea or existing project or want to automate something as an example. So, you can start there as a technical person. As a non-technical person, you can read the documentation, see if the documentation clear enough for you to build something very quick, again, helping yourself to fix something. So, find this one thing you want to fix and in particular in GitLab, it can be in many areas. It can be in project management where you're doing something with a board or it can be in an animation where you're trying to send yourself notifications from time to time. You can do all that with GitLab. So, while building the project, also, keep referring to the documentation, you'll find some things that might be not very clear or something that is challenging enough and that would be already a first contribution actually over going this hurdle, overcoming this hurdle, fixing it and trying to also fix something small, but don't let the size scare you because even every small thing brings bigger and bigger things. So, eventually, you'll see that, oh, this can be improved and you won't see it straight away. It takes time for development, but, again, that's what I'm teaching as well. Don't worry about searching for this thing. Just keep on doing, keep on going for your goal, fixing your problem or building your project and eventually you find some things that you think, yeah, I can improve that. I can contribute more code or I can help to review this issue or I can write a better documentation or tutorial and this is where the contribution starts, really, although it started way before it started when you started doing something for yourself and this is how I started and this is how heard many people started as well contributing so you don't have to be technical, but I think you need to have some sort of a goal or a mission to finish it. Doesn't matter how big it is. Awesome, thank you for that and I want to reiterate that when we talk about contributions like Vlad, Abel and Mario mentioned, it doesn't necessarily have to always be technical. A contribution to the community can also be or CIGIT Lab can be even organizing a meetup, right? So there's so many different ways to contribute here at GitLab. Next question. How do you think GitLab's open source core model affects your experience as a contributor? Do you feel like you have more or less power to contribute as a result of the GitLab's model? Abel, let's kick it off. OK, so I will say the GitLab model kind of, it feels more like you have more power to contribute. Why I said so is because you have access to more resources to do better and you know, with more resources, you'll be able to contribute much more better and effectively. But regardless of that, you can also, you know, contribute either way. So yeah, I feel it gives more power to contribute better. Awesome, Vlad, do you want to share? I've been big contributed to open source and working with open source for a large number of years and I think open source doesn't only comes to the code, it also comes to the, you know, modern government sharing open data models and different statistics now where in times where actually statistics matters, where we can see we can actually get in out of a very tough situation. So any open model, in my perspective, is much better than, you know, closed and proprietary model. The access to a data or access to open core gives more people ability. So you kind of lower in the threshold of contribution does, as I mentioned before, it doesn't matter how big or small the contribution is. So I'm always pro open data and pro open source. And in this case, you would actually probably would find a contributor where you didn't expect to find that. So it's not necessarily can be a technical community. It can be people from all different backgrounds. But until you actually open your data, open your code, you will never find out where it can come from. Also, a very good example I'd like to give is years ago, one of my colleagues asked, Oh, what's the point of open source software? I don't see how you can earn money. It's free. And I don't see a point. And I answered them. Well, actually, where can you find the thousands, thousand free testers? Because once your software gets popular and more than thousand people using it, literally have a thousand people testing your software literally for free. So in this case, this exchange gives you a possibility to build much better product with that many testers that you probably wouldn't be able to hire. Thank you. Mario, do you want to share your opinion on this? Yeah, I think that the open core model of GitLab is actually an opportunity for people to start contributing. And the idea that most conversations happen publicly, you can go to the repository and see what people are working on. And the idea that you don't have to start contributing on a specific project, but the one that you would like to help with. And as I mentioned before, you don't need to have a technical background. You can contribute with documentation. Also, localizing content from English that most of the documentation is in English. But you can translate that to your language. I mean, I speak English as a second language. And it's something that I've been doing in the past. And the idea that if you want or if you want to learn, you can contribute with code or you can participate at any of the hackathons that GitLab organizes. And, well, you will also have the support from team members and the community that is actually involved in any of the projects that GitLab is working on. Thank you. Does anyone else have any other points they want to piggyback on from the other heroes that just shared their opinion on this? All right. Go ahead and jump to the next question. Have you made friends in the wider GitLab community? What do you like and what do you want to see more of in our community? Vlad, do you want to kick this one off? I actually haven't been to any GitLab events. But I got to know people as a part of a GitLab Heroes program, definitely, and I'm following them on social media and what they do in their work life. So that's been quite an interesting journey. And as I mentioned before, just seeing different people from different continents, how they take GitLab and use it in their teaching for work. That's been quite an experience. Overall, in open source, I did go to different conferences and definitely met people there. And I'm probably looking forward to my face-to-face GitLab event sometime in the future. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to make any previous conferences. But so far, the experience digitally, it's been great. Thank you. And Maria, how about you? Yeah, I have the opportunity to attend, and I speak at GitLab Committee in London in 2019. And I met some heroes there. And I'm still in contact with them to these days. But also, now that events are happening in virtual spaces, I have the opportunity to meet some other heroes. And that's why I started organizing the GitLab meeting for Latin America. I mean, I met a hero from Colombia and we've been organizing these events, but also organizing other activities. Awesome. It's pretty cool to me that we get to or I get to manage and support global programs like this, because I get to talk to different people from all over the globe and build and cultivate relationships. I've been in open source for only three years. And with that and being in the community, I have relationships that transpire into the different companies that I've worked for and supported in open source, especially because I've been supporting meetup programs or the wider community. So it's pretty cool that I, too, have also made friends in the community as well. And how about you, Abel? Yeah, so I personally have made a lot of friends through the GitLab hero program. So the very fact that GitLab itself is built on core values, which is collaboration and others, I see that as a direct extension to even the hero program as well as the community. So through the hero program, I've met a lot of folks out there, virtually, as well as in person during events and all of that. I have got to meet key industry players in Africa through this open source meetups and all of that. So yeah, I think it's a great opportunity to network and meet more people and have that professional relationship with others. Absolutely, Abel. I agree with that as well. We're going to keep this conversation in motion and we're going to jump to the next question. What do you like to do outside of contributing to open source? What are your hobbies? Vlad, go ahead and kick that off and share. Sure, apart from sitting in front of the computer for a number of hours a day, I like to go as much outside. So I do martial arts. I go for a run. I do a bit of music here and there. Actually, my second degree is audio engineering, so I like to record stuff as well. I play drums. So and overall probably looking to get out away from the devices as much as I can. So any excuse to actually spend a weekend somewhere far away from technology or internet connection is actually looking good to me. So that's me. Awesome, I was going to ask about the guitars and instruments in your background as well. So Abel, how about you? What do you enjoy doing outside of contributing to open source? So I love playing football. I recently started learning how to play chess. I'm still a beginner chess, but I'm kind of learning that. And even outside open source communities, I still like to network. I still like to meet new people and kind of know each other. So yeah, that's basically me. Thank you. And Mario, how about you? Well, outside contributing to open source, I really like reading. And I recently bought some books that I still have to read. But I really enjoyed that and listening to music, something that I really miss. But I hope that I could be doing it again soon. It's traveling. And apart from that, something that most people don't know about is that my family has always raised chickens. And that is something that I'm doing also. And well, that's me. Question, Mario, how many chickens do y'all have? Now we have 27. And I guess I'll share what I like doing outside of contributing. I love to travel. So, Mario, I definitely understand now that things are opening back up, that urge to start planning some trips. I'm a huge music person. I don't know if you can see behind me, but I have Janet Jackson over my shoulder. I have a record player, and I listen to my old iCollect records. I'm really excited about concerts starting back up. I love live music. And so I'm really looking forward to attending a live show again. So that's what I like to do outside of contributing open source and managing the open source programs as well. So many of y'all are part of the Heroes Steering Committee and have been part of the Heroes program for quite some time. Like I said, I've only been here since February, so y'all are much more seasoned than I am. So I would love to hear where you would like to see the program grow in the next year or two. And go ahead, Vlad, you can kick it off. I always like the programs and open source communities that do value the contributions that they give. So I think for me, it would be just finding new people, bringing new people to the table, the ideas of where the product itself and the community can go to. It's quite a large project covering different aspects of software development, project management and security and all 10 areas that GitLab gives. So I think it would be good to see maybe Heroes specializing in different aspects of it, so we can all balance of each other. For example, if we have Hero Summit and or Heroes Conference, we know that some people are very into the security and so we can actually look at them in ability to learn but actually knowing that there are people specializing in the areas, I think that would be quite interesting to see that you will be able to find them easily and follow whatever they do, training, blogging, presentations, contributions. So I think actually focus on a specific area of the GitLab would be great to see it's something I'm looking forward to because most of our jobs are really focusing on one thing, we specialize and really go into in depth in one thing but always keen to learn things from different aspects. For example, I'm always keen to learn more about security, more about project management, although day-to-day basis, it only takes about 10% of my work whereas 90% it's development, code review, team leading. So I would like to get a bit more knowledge in the different areas. So and I think Heroes program is great for that because we have a lot of potential as you mentioned before, almost 100 Heroes specializing in all different areas GitLab. So it would be good to see the, I guess the GitLab Hero tracks all different areas where they specialize too. I would really love to see that. Thank you Vlad for your opinion on this and also I'm taking really detailed notes in regards to what y'all are sharing on this question as well. Abel, do you wanna share? Yeah, so okay, I personally want to see a growth in impact. So the potentiality is there, but now I want to say in a year or two where the GitLab Hero is able to grow its impact on the open source community and ensure that that kind of standard among others and more be like a path to open source community as a whole. So that impact is what I really look forward to exploring that potential as well. So yeah. Thank you Abel. Mario, would you like to share? Yeah, something I've been working on since I joined the program is creating more content in Spanish but something I really would like to see is more people joining us from Latin America. I mean, we've been organizing the meetup for the region since last year, but I really would like to see more people participating and contributing from this part of the world. And well, I think it could, well, something that we are planning to do in the following month is inviting other people to share their experience, not only on using GitLab or on how they are using GitLab for any of the projects they are working on, but also knowledge that we think it would be helpful for the community. And well, like, we are having a meetup this month and we invited a developer that recently joined GitLab and we want to hear from him how was the process and what would they want to recommend people that would like to apply not only to GitLab but any similar company. Awesome, thank you for that. And I wanted to piggyback on your point about diversifying where folks contribute from. One of my goals for the program in the next year is to encourage folks in different parts of the world to contribute. I think that's why those questions earlier about if people are hesitant to contribute, how do we get that to contribute or how do we get them to apply if they had, you know, did some pretty great contributions or organizations on behalf of GitLab, right? So one of my goals is to see in the next year or two even more diverse level of heroes applying and becoming active in the community as well. And on to the next question. Actually, that was the last question. So I wanna say thank you so much for all of you who participated today and joined us on the heroes unmasked. This is one of many conversations that we're gonna have like this as we're looking to expand the heroes program and grow exponentially. So again, if you're interested, please scan the QR code. It will pull up all the information so you can learn more about the program as well as applying if you've already made some great contributions to GitLab. So any final words from my heroes that are online with us today? Yeah, so I will just repeat, I'll just repeat the advice I was given earlier so people that are hesitant in contributing to the open source community. Just make sure you just get out there, try and contribute even if it's as little as possible. No contribution is too small or too big in the open source community. So ensure you contribute and you jump in as early as possible. So that would be it from me. Thank you, Mario, I'm glad. Do you have any last words that you wanna share about your experience as a GitLab hero and or just to folks that are interested in the program or wanting to contribute? Yeah, now that you hear from us what is being a GitLab hero, if you would like to apply and join the program, you can find us on social media and if you have any questions, I really, I would be happy to help if you want to join the program. I just wanted to say thanks, Jamie, for organizing it and bringing this all together and having this conversation. It's definitely a learning curve for all of us and it's a great experience to learn from what we're all doing. And there are different ways to contact GitLab Heroes program. You can read about it on GitLab website. There is a Gitter chat and of course, you can go and see the hero's profile on a GitLab website, which is a great thing to do. So you can see the diversity that Jamie was talking about of GitLab Heroes and what they do. So I'm really enjoying being part of the program and thanks, Jamie, again, it was a great chat. Thank you. And again, thank you for joining Commit 2021 virtually and we hope next year that we will be face-to-face having another heroes unmasked. Thank you.