 things started. So, you know, first of all, happy new year. Hope you had a good holidays. So I mean, we're, believe it or not, we're almost like into the third week of January. So this year is already starting really fast. So I'm sharing the slide deck or sharing my screen. So hopefully you can see it. And then I'm going to post on the chat window where the notes are supposed to be. So if you can, anyone can help with notes. Where's the chat window? Whoops, not that. There you go. So those are the notes if you can help during, with the note taking, they'll be great. I guess without further ado, we'll get started. So pretty quick items to start with. A couple of follow-up items. And thank you, George, for reminding me of the action items to follow up on. And then we've been talking about improving the core team page. So we'll just talk about where we're at. Hi, Remy, how are you? Hello. I'm good. Your background looks really cool. Okay. Nice. Okay. And the third item is on the hackathon. Just the blog post just went out this morning, my time in California. And then wanted to spend as much time as we can talking about encouraging casual contributors to become more regular contributors like people on this call. I know that's not a, I mean, a simple topic, but just wanted to, you know, at least start brainstorming some ideas. And then if you have some time at the end, just wanted to give people a reminder on a couple of events in Brussels in starting in about three weeks. Gip Merge and Fawze and both are kind of back-to-back in Brussels. So I wanted to talk to you quickly about that. So a couple of action items starting from that we talked about last month. GitLab Contribute. I think I saw a number of people posting questions on the Contribute channel on Slack. But reminder that to book your flights by the 1st of February, if you haven't done so already. And then I'm not sure if we talked about this last month, but we're planning to invite some of the other contributors that are not part of the core team to the event. So we'll hopefully get to have more community members participate. So we're trying to figure out logistics in terms of, like at discounts that we want to provide and if they'll be able to travel. So that's conversations been going on for past several weeks. So hopefully we'll all get to meet some of these other contributors that are not part of the core team. So stay tuned for that. But George, was there anything else that you wanted to follow up on? Or I'm not sure that just wanted to remind everybody that to make your travel arrangements? No, I think that was it. I mean, and that's because of the deadline for booking flights next month. Right. Yeah, it's coming fast. So I have a question to that. Do we have a list of contributors which are considered to be invited? Yeah, I'm compiling that list right now. So I mean, you'll probably in a couple of topics, you'll probably see some of the names that we've been considering. It's people that have been making a lot of contributions over the years. Sure. So yeah. Yeah, I think we sent, I think I reached out to about 15 or so people in the community. And then some of them unfortunately said they just can't, they're not available at that time frame. I mean, some of them, like one person's working on a thesis. And so, I mean, valid reasons for not being able to attend. So we started outreach probably about a month ago in December. So it's trying to organize it there. Cool. And then, yeah, I mean, hopefully depending on what country you're from, obviously, there's there's also a visa issues that you might have to contend with. So earlier, you start working on that the better. Yeah, it's just not a pleasant thing to deal with, unfortunately. Cool. And then the next item is on the proofreaders. I think, Remy, I think you brought this topic up a couple of months ago. So the documentation has been updated. And then you see the quotes there of like a specific item that I updated. And since then, I've gotten requests for new proofreaders for a couple of languages. And I basically use this, apply this rule. I mean, I may have pinged some of you to approve somebody as a proofreader. So that's been working well so far. And yes, and then the GitLab merchandise or swag has been sent out to all the proofreaders. So recognition has been sent out. And not sure if you saw early last week, I think it was I posted a blog post trying to encourage people to contribute translation to GitLab. So hopefully we'll see some more activities in a number of languages. That's great. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, this is like one of the hidden gems at GitLab, I think, like people don't realize this is all basically done by community. And ironically, interestingly, one of the questions I got on Twitter after I posted that blog was what about documentation, which is a bigger problem, right? I mean, that's not as easy to do versus translating our UI. So I mean, there was an existing issue that I mean, this started two years ago that we don't have a short term solution for that. But that was, you know, one question I got following the blog post. Cool. Any other questions on this or George is that like answer some of the questions you had on profiteers? No, the only point was that adding a header at the top of the proofreader section to explain how to become and just it's a lower in this section. But it's okay, we can leave it as it is for now. Yeah, I mean, feel free to, I mean, minor, yes. Yeah, ping me and see if anything needs to be tweaked, or you can even make the tweak yourself, right? So on the documentation. But cool. Okay. So moving right along the core team page layout, I think, I mean, the only person that have added yourself to the team page is probably you, George, and Jacobos or Robert and Hannes, if you can submit an MR, basically to add your photo and your location, I believe, those are the two entries that you need to to add in the MR. It should be described in the issue there. But if you have any questions, just ping me or reach out to me, you can basically use the same photo that you that we have in our current core team page. But I think only two people are two people from the core team are headed to the page. Sure. Question to that. Should we remove ourselves from the old core page? No, no, you don't need to. Well, I'll clean that up later on once everybody's added to the team page. So just worry about the adding to the page. And I'll worry about the other older page that we're trying to remove. Cool. And I think somebody else had a question. I don't know if that was Hannes or you, George. No, I didn't have a question. Cool. Yeah, I mean, let me know if you have any questions. This should be pretty straightforward. And in on the second bullet, in terms of updating the layout, I think a couple of weeks ago, maybe it was last week, I think George, you were part of the conversation, I ping Yarek and Luke on the Slack channel. So I guess, I mean, I guess if we need to, we can open an issue on www.gitlab.com. But I mean, unfortunately, this is one of the things that got put in the backlog, I guess. But George, I guess it's up to us to kind of submit an MR to move forward on the shorter version of your proposal. So. Yes, probably. Yes. The only, the two things that I have in mind is that I haven't done much work with middleman. And the second one is that having the alumni core team should remove all the data in the team.yaml or just use a different file, I'm not sure. But maybe we can open an MR and discuss on it. Right. Yeah, I think, I think I may have commented on it on the alumni page. I think we just, we can just keep it in a separate page. I mean, it's, I mean, I almost feel like it's just too much work to tackle both of them. I'm not sure about the other way. Maybe Yarek knows better, but yeah. Okay. I mean, so at least they're aware of it. I think they were just, you know, they probably didn't notice that we're mentioning them in our issue. So, but at least we, you know, we got their attention. So hopefully we can ping them if we need to, but I think we can move forward. So cool. Okay. Anything else on this or move on? Cool. All right. On the hackathon. So the, the blog posts got posted this morning. So the next one is about a month from now. So February 12th and 13th, I believe this is Tuesday and Wednesday of that week. And one of the new twists that or, or new thing that we're going to try out on this hackathon is I'm going to meet with the product team tomorrow. And I've been meeting with some of the product managers over the past couple of months. What I want to try to do is, I mean, I've been very happy with the number of MRs that have been coming in during the hackathons. But what I also wanted to do was to encourage on some of the issues that are important to our product team members. So to highlight some of the issues. So as an experiment, we're just going to try out like one from, like each of the product teams, like one from managed, one from secure, one from verify as an example, and to highlight some of the issues that we want to encourage community members to work on. And if anybody works on those MRs, they'll get an extra prize as, as, as a, as an incentive. So we're going to try that out and then see how that works out. And we might increase the number at the future hackathons or, or even like do this like year around, like not even wait until hackathon, but highlight some of the specific issues and encourage people to work on them, almost like a contest. So the specific issues and what those will be, I'll work with the product managers over the next couple of weeks. And we'll start publicizing them on the hackathon page. So that's something slightly different we're trying to do. A question that can you compile this list very soon, because it would be cool that if, if contributors have this notice issues already ahead of the hackathon to start, start getting into that. Yeah. I mean, my goal is to basically finalize this list or at least start compiling the list on, on the hackathon page in the next couple of weeks and start advertising them. And then so yeah, I mean, I think I assume a lot of these things won't necessarily be trivial. So it'll require some planning and people to start working on them. So yeah, I mean, the goal is definitely publicize this by hopefully by the end of the month. So people know what, what those special issues are. So yeah, good feedback though. Yeah, I don't want to publicize it like on the morning of when the hackathon starts and people are scrambling. So that would not be very successful. Cool. Let me make a note of that. Okay. Cool. And obviously looking forward to everybody participating. And like I said, the numbers have been great. I think I don't remember the exact number, what the exact numbers were for the, for the last one in November, I think we got over 60 MRs across different products and, you know, definitely want to see a repeat of that, but also want to have, you know, encourage people to work on specific items that, that, you know, product manager feel are important. So you mentioned that the numbers are great. I mean, have you're comparing that to like normal numbers, right? Not just in general? Yeah, I mean, I'm like specifically comparing, I mean, if you look at like the numbers for like 11.6 release, right? I mean, there's like a significant bump in terms of community contributions and a lot of that had to do with I mean, I think hackathon was a big factor. So you definitely see a, see a bump. And then I think we saw the same thing at the first hackathon in September. So and then the numbers like even between the first hackathon, there was like a significant increase. I think it almost like we tripled the number of MRs from the first hackathon to the next. So I'm not sure, Ben, if that answers your question. But yeah, no, I mean, I just know that a lot of time it's a lot of the same people submitting stuff. But anyway, yeah, no, we actually for the second hackathon, we had a lot of first hand contributors. I don't have the number like in in front of me. But I think there, I mean, there were a lot of MRs that came from like people I didn't like notice before. So I mean, it's obviously, you know, it's hard to quantify, but I mean, I do feel like the word's getting out, which is nice. So okay, cool. So the other topic that I wanted to go over and it won't necessarily be a structured conversation, but I pulled out some stats and I have a couple of links here that people can look at. In I mean, 2018, we had, I think, like over 430 like community members that are submitting MRs across like different projects. This includes like GDK, like runners, you know, CEE and et cetera. So I mean, that number in and of itself sounds sounds pretty nice. But if you look at people who've done like more than five merge requests, they're only like 33 of them, it's like less than 10%. And then I can show you this table, which I added a link to. So I compiled like a list of people from 2016 to 2018. I mean, sorry, like some of these may be hard to see because I use some highlights to delineate like different levels of contributions. And I kind of pick like number five and be like based on what I was looking at here from 2016 to 2018. If you look at like a heavy contributors, either a lot of these people are either already on the core team or like they're part of GitLab, like people like Vinny, right, who was like a top contributor in 2016. So and but if you look at the rest, there's like a significant drop off from people. Like if you look at like people in like, I mean, like, like red or like a blue color, there's there's like a, like a significant number of MRs, like probably in the order of like a two or three a month, like people are getting like their MRs merged. And then after that, there's a pretty significant drop off. And I think 2018, I mean, this just shows you like this is sort of a cut off where people had like five MRs. And then there are a lot of people that had like a two or three the entire year. So I kind of picked a number. And I think that was in in response to Tonya's question. You know, you know, what am I defining as like casual versus like regular? And when I looked at that, I thought five was like somewhat reasonable as well. Because I mean, if you look at five or six, that translates to roughly like one merged MR, like every other month. And once you go beyond that, it's I mean, so if you're contributing like more than like one every other month that translates to about five or six. So I thought that was sort of a reasonable number to start with. So let me just pause there and see if you any of you have any questions or comments or or thoughts on that. But and then we can talk about the second bullet item in terms of like, how do we encourage like some of the more casual contributors. But I don't know if you all have any thoughts or feedback. Just to understand what what's the motivation between behind motivating them to contribute more to have a more stable core team. I mean, that's one of them. I mean, it's not necessarily to increase the increase the size of the core team necessarily. But so I think one of the things that I tried to do when I started about six months ago is to basically, you know, create a like a large funnel at the top. Like if you if you think of this is in terms of almost like a sales funnel, we want to raise awareness and have as many people as possible like contribute to get lab. So I mean, that was step one. The next step is to have a lot of these, you know, people who started contributing and to I want to encourage them to contribute on a regular basis so that we have a like a large pool of people that are like a reliably contributing on a regular basis. Like if these numbers like fluctuate too much, like, you know, we have a lot of people that contribute like a couple of MRs this year and then disappear like next year, then I'm not sure if we can say we have a healthy community to start with or we have a reliable like a community resource that we can we can reach out to in terms of not just in terms of like code, but also in terms of feedback and their and their feedback in terms of how how get lab is working. But for more contributions, couldn't it just be that there are personal reasons for not contributing anymore? Like, yeah, I mean, they'll they'll always be drop offs. Like I don't anticipate that like everybody will stick around with what the get lab project could, you know, for the long term. But, you know, just, you know, once you raise awareness, I think the next step, you know, naturally is to have like a stable core group of people that are that are contributing to get lab. And, you know, if you see this number, I mean, it's not necessarily signed, like, you know, necessarily organized or scientific. I mean, the number is like a growing slightly from year over year, like in terms of number of people that are contributed like more than five, it went from like 18 one year to about 20 next year and then to like 25 or or 33. But yeah, so it's it's definitely happening. But I like to see this like accelerate even even further. I guess that's another thing. But so the you want to raise the number of people or the number of contributions per person? I mean, so what I'd like to do, I mean, you guys can tell me if this is if you don't think this is right thing. I like to increase the number of people that are contributing five or more per year. I mean, so I'm I'll just make up a number we have 33 last year, like I love to get up to like 50 as an example by end of 2019. Right. And, and then what what each of those people are like individual contributing, whether it's five or like, you know, like 200 like George did last year, but it's I'm not sure if that's as important. But I'd like to have a more core base of people that are that are contributing on a on the regular basis. Yep, makes sense. To do that, I mean, sounds like more science might need to go behind this, right? Like, a lot of it is just probably little tiny things that, you know, just a five by just being almost a little small thing. But it could also be that someone else has five, because after five, they just were so frustrated. I want them to get submerged if they just stop bothering. Right. Yeah, I mean, that's a possibility. I mean, I like I've done a sort of a cursory review of the of the data that we have. And then, you know, I, I obviously haven't seen like, after five, like what happened, like, did they reach five by July and they got frustrated after that? Or, or was there another reason? But I mean, one of the things where I guess we're sort of jumping on to the next topic here, you know, how do we actually do this? I mean, one of the things that that I started talking to David about was do something like a badging of contributor community contributors, like if you do, like, I'm again, just I'm using these numbers as an example, if you do more than 10 MRS merge per year, then you get, like, you know, you get, you get like a silver star, right? And then if you have more than 50, then you get a gold star. If you have more than 100, then you're, you're like a platinum. So there'll be like a labeling or bashing up like contributors to to recognize like regular contributions. I don't know if there will be enough to like persuade people to do that. I mean, obviously, we'll have to do other things like Ben, you were talking about like making it really easy to have people regularly contribute. But I mean, some of the recognition of like the work that's being done outside of core core team membership might be something like worth visiting. That's one of the things that I thought about. But I don't know if you guys, people on this call have other thoughts or or comments on that. I mean, the point system is interesting, although it quickly gets complicated. I mean, if you you're probably familiar with like Google Maps point system, right, they assign the value to every different type of contribution and and, you know, they just try to base on points or not. So I think that it could be interesting that it might take a while and quite a bit of work to actually make it pay off. Yeah, I mean, I also don't want to make it like really complicated. I don't I don't want people to have like advanced degree in statistics to figure out like how do I become like a, you know, reach the goal label. For example, I want to make it like relatively simple. But if you've seen something that's that you thought was cool in different communities, I mean, please please let me know. But you know, I haven't thought like much beyond what I what I just described. But Robert, did you ever comment or question? Nice. Could just be background notes, I guess. But did you try to contact some of the contributors on that list? Yes, I did actually. Yes. I'm sorry. Go ahead, Hannes. What what did they say? Why is it contributed or whether I stopped contributing after five? Yeah, I mean, I haven't like necessarily seen anybody who stopped. But one person that you probably notice here that's been contributing over the past three years is this person here is Samion Pupkov. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that name correctly. And I'm actually going to feature him on a blog that next this month's developer blog. And I mean, I, I mean, I think I've seen that name before, but I didn't realize his contribution went as far back as like, I think it was like 8.8.6 like GitLab 8.6 like a long time ago. And he's been doing on a very regular basis. And also when I reached out to some of the other people for for inviting them to GitLab contribute, like I can't find their names here. I mean, there are like, like this person here at Jasper. I mean, this person does like enormous amount of work just just doing like a lot of like, like housekeeping work for like Ruby work, right, basically. And, and he just like very reliable on a consistent basis. And I mean, definitely want to see like more of those people. And, but I mean, I think, honest, and then you make a good point, I should probably also look at people like some of the people who dropped off or whatever reason I should probably find out why, if they for some reason, if they contributed in 2016 and 17 and within CM in 2018, I think that's interesting exercise to do. Might also be interesting just to kind of get an average how long it took for them to get the MRs merged over the years to see if we're improving the time there or if you if you're getting worse. Okay, yeah. I mean, I've been looking at like a time to merge like the media number over the releases, but I have only looked at like numbers for I think Q3 and Q4, I believe last year. But yeah, I can definitely take a look at earlier periods and and see if I'm seeing different trends or trends that are not necessarily good. Yeah, also, not just doing do that for the for all contributors about specific to the persons on that list. I mean, yeah, so for example, if you have, I don't know, JD Bean with six contributors this year, it would be interesting to see if what this time to merge was. Right. Yeah. Okay. If we can see a trend for persons there. I also feel that splitting that number by font in the back end makes sense because my impression is that much that back end merge requests get reviewed a bit faster than front merge requests. And but I don't have numbers to support that claim. So maybe we would need to look at specific specific reviews more. I'm not sure if that's too much work though to Yeah, I mean, I'll that's actually that's an interesting one. Like I was thinking also thinking like documentation, because I got pinged by somebody on the documentation team on like if there are like certain bottlenecks on documentation MRs. But yeah, I'll see what I can do. I think I can probably do some queries on the Baturja dashboard. I mean, I will, I may not be necessarily able to do this in the next week or so, but hopefully before next meeting, I can take a look at some data. Cool. So just one last question. Is this just on where these numbers just from GetLab CE or this also? Yeah, this is specifically for CE and EE. I wanted to make the exercise simpler. So I just focus on the two products. But yeah, I could probably look at other products as well. I just know like, for example, I mean, I get the feeling that I have contributed more to the omnibus that maybe that's not active. But anyway, I think there's certain cases where some people might be active in omnibus, but not that totally. Yeah. Someone like me, I do a lot with running GetLab, not as much with developing GetLab. So I tend to go there more. Yeah. I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if like reviews are done quicker on CE and EE as an example. But yeah, we just started pulling data on other products as well. If you go to Batergia, so I don't know if you can. Yeah. So I'm pulling data for like GDK. I don't know if omnibus is on here. I could double check. Yeah, omnibus is there. So cool. Yeah, I can take a look at other products. It shouldn't be that difficult to do. You just need to find the time. Cool. Yeah. I mean, thanks for your questions and comments. This is definitely helpful. Hopefully I could like report back on this like next month or like on like, on the issue for this meeting. But yeah, if you have any other thoughts or feedback beyond what we're able to discuss today, please let me know. Cool. And last item. So for people, I think I reached out to you, Hanes, specifically about FOSM. I mean, I think some of you live relatively close to Brussels at least, are able to get on the train. So there are two events back to back. So Gitmerge and FOSM. I mean, FOSM has always been in Brussels and Gitmerge just is happening like right before that in Brussels. In Gitmerge, where GitLab is sponsoring the event, and there are a limited number of passes available that I can give out to community members. So George, I'm still trying to get confirmation on, I assume the passes are good for both like day one and day two. The main event is February 1st and 31st, I believe is like a contributor summit plus like a number of workshops that are there happening on Thursday. George, if you're interested in the past, just let me know. I can give you the code so you can register for free. I don't think it's that expensive of an event anyways. It's about 150 euros for both days. But I mean, if you don't have to pay for it, why should you? So I think I got about 12 passes for community members and I gave away two to a couple of people. But George, if you're interested, just ping me on Slack and I can give you the code. And then there are a couple of discussions, some discussions that are happening on the Slack channel if you're interested in seeing it. And the FOSAM follows like right after, like on Saturday and Sunday, we'll have a stand in FOSAM that's always been a free event. You don't even need to register, you just show up at the university. So I mean, George, if you're there, forget merge if you want to stick around for like another day or so. I mean, we'll love to have you at our stand too, like we'll make you work. But it'll be good to talk to community members there. And David's coming over from Cologne and if others are interested in joining us, just join either one of the channels and look forward to seeing you there if you can make it. So cool. That's all I had. I've got about 10 minutes left if there are any other topics that people want to discuss. Yeah, I have one. Yeah. I noticed that currently, if you want to contribute to the GitLab Runner, it's pretty hard because the team is currently overwhelmed and it takes a very long time to get even initial feedback on the MRs because I think there are only three people or something like that that can even review them on GitLab. So I found one that didn't receive any feedbacks for like seven months or something like that. Okay. I'm not sure if we can do something to help there or if the team needs to be bigger for that to improve. But currently, it's really hard to get the merge requests that are there merged simply because the review doesn't happen because nobody has the time. Okay. Could you like a post that like an MR like on the Slack channel for the core team and yeah, or yeah, you can't even do it on the chat here. Let's see. Yeah, I'm not even sure if I remember who the maintainers are for. That should be, I think, Kamil, Thomas. Okay. Oh, that's you. Oops. Sorry. So just one example. Yeah. He opened it a year ago, received feedback after a month or two to rebase it. Right. It took a little while. So I come from there like seven months without getting anything. Yeah. And I think you chimed in like three weeks ago too, it looks like. Yeah. I don't know. Like Remy or Vinny, do you have any other suggestions or like? Really, because if people are not, I mean, if people internally are not aware of a project and don't have expertise, I see how people, for example, me are not comfortable with reviewing it. So having people added to the team who have knowledge in that area sounds like a good plan to me if we can somehow manage that. I'm not sure what a good strategy there will be. Yeah. But if we want community contributions, I guess that's the price that we have to pay to add more people that have capacity. Right. I mean, at least like the last feedback before Christmas was that, you know, try to review this before by mid-January. But we'll say, I guess, you know, I can just do another ping like next week to make sure that this is on the top of his list. But I don't know. I think Remy, were you about to say something? No, I was saying the same. We need more people that have the expertise to. So maybe what we can do is, because we already have people with good expertise in these options, so maybe we can try to. You know what? I actually met somebody who just started today. He knows Go really well. So maybe maybe I'll forward this on to him. I mean, I got assigned as his buddy, and then we were talking and he said he joined the Giddily team and he loves Go. And so, all right, I'd be happy to do that. The other thing is that currently, the bot is not active for the Giddily runner, so new MRs are not labeled as community contribution automatically. There is an issue about that. Again, it has to do with the fact that there are not enough people on the team to handle the load of notifications that bot produces by default. So currently, most of us just to enable the automatic labeling and without notifications for now. Yeah, that seems like a good idea. The last issue that we talked about, in some cases, that's a little bit too focused on the code base when it comes to community contributions and organization stuff. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, thanks for that. Any other topics? I guess we can wrap up four minutes early. Once again, happy 2019 and I'll talk to you all again soon. Thank you. Have a good day in Europe. Thank you.