 To open our next block on the main stage at GitLab Commit, I'd like to welcome Darva Satcher. Darva is an engineering manager here at GitLab, and I can tell you personally that she lives GitLab's values and she is a joy to collaborate with. As a leader at GitLab, she pulls together other people to do amazing things. In this session, Darva will share with you how she brought together GitLab team members to teach a course at Morehouse College, a historically black college in Atlanta, Georgia. They innovated together to invest in and raise up the next generation of DevOps leaders. Hello, my name is Darva Satcher, and I am a senior engineering manager here at GitLab. I work in the creating stage. Today, I'd like to share a little something about myself. I am originally from Oakland, California, and as a young girl, I recall seeing images of professionals in my community, but none of them looked like me. I heard about Spelman College, a historically black college for African-American women in the United States and Atlanta, Georgia. And I was instantly curious about the school. I learned more about Spelman and felt like that's where I need to be. So once I went to Spelman, I pretty much was extremely pleased with my experience. They didn't just tell me that I was excellent. They didn't just teach me how to be excellent. They also showed me excellence that had come before me. While at Spelman, every week we would have something called Convocation where they would bring in someone who was maybe a CEO, who was a woman, African-American woman who's a politician or African-American person who was a VP in a company. And I saw it and realized that if they can do it, hey, so can I, right? So I've always had the feeling of, I received a lot from Spelman and those women who came and spoke with us. And I always wanted to give back to my community. And now that I'm at GitLab, I have a few tools at my disposal. So an opportunity presented itself in 2020, COVID, right? COVID is a really bad thing, but it forced people to come up with innovative ways to solve problems. And one problem I've observed as a senior engineering manager was that it was really difficult to find underrepresented talent in the sourcing pool. And that really the problem is how do we diversify tech? Another problem I saw was there are a lot of universities that without any guidance, without any warning, had to all of a sudden teach in a remote learning environment. And then there was the problem of, how do you teach a course that's impactful and just as good as the course that they will get in person? So with all these things swirling in my head, this is what I decided to do, diversity. Our first one is to tackle diversity by reaching out to our Dib manager, Candace Williams. And I said, Candace, I'd like to do something. What could we do to reach out to schools? And Candace said, well, why don't you call it the schools? I was like, great innovative idea, ask them what they need, right? So I reached out to Morehouse College, which is the historically black college that's all male, that's across the street from Spelman. And I asked them, is there anything that GitLab can do to support you and your students throughout this time? And Morehouse said, yes, we have a program where we have organizations come on campus and partner with instructors and teach a course. That sounded like a pretty good idea to me. So from there, I reached out to the MIT Employee Resource Group, which is Minorities in Tech Employee Resource Group, where Erica Flowers and Sharif Bennett are the leads. I told them about the idea. They thought, hey, that's great. From there, I went to my manager, Tim Zalman, who's a senior director for development. And then we talked to Christopher Lefelis, who is the VP of development. And next was the CTO, Eric Johnson. And all of them were extremely supportive. And they said, sure, go ahead, do whatever you want. Just share with us your plan and your proposal. So meanwhile, Morehouse is struggling with how do we convert from this in-person learning experience to this remote learning experience. And I had to put together a plan for how to do that. And GitLab was the best tool to implement that plan. What I ended up doing was reaching out to my wonderful team members, like Eric Schurter, who helped me create this GitLab pages site, which was the central hub for everything about the course. We were able to create multiple pages using GitLab pages. And what we did, we used this as a way to communicate with the students. And we created a curriculum that was based on the DevOps phases, as well as had courses focused on different careers, as well as had a real live project that were the customers' built-up feature. We used GitLab, as I said, to create the website. We used GitLab for discussions so students could use issues to discuss the current lecture or homework assignments. We also used GitLab pages for the homework assignments. And we also used GitLab projects, which is great for just tracking your own personal work in a private environment based on personal permissions. Here you can see we used GitLab epics and issues for the planning of the course and collaborating async with all the team members at GitLab, whether it was instructors or team members who were just interested. We also, like I mentioned before, had discussions. And you can see where different students worked on different merge requests. And you can follow all of them in one centralized location using GitLab, the impact. So it was very innovative for us to go into the schools and teach with instructors, pairing GitLab team members from all over the world with instructors. It was innovative to teach a course and using GitLab as the spine or the backbone of technology that the students use. It was also innovative to have a unique impact from a remote learning perspective to rival that of an in-person, in-class course. So I had really high goals for having high quality instructors, high quality content, and also sharing career stories. So when I was younger, having people who look like them share about how they decided to be, let's say, a product manager and their journey from university all the way to where they are now, that was really important for me to make sure the students got that experience. The question is, did we succeed? Right now, I'd like to introduce Cherie Bennett, the mid-market account executive, who interviewed each of the students, and now we can get a little bit of their perspective on what they felt about the course. It was definitely like a breath of fresh air to have such energetic and such relatable, I guess, is the way to go with the relatable lecturers because they felt less like professors and more like engineers just talking to you and teaching you things. It felt kind of like somebody was working with you on the job. It felt like week one of an internship to me, every class. For you, after doing this for 18 weeks, what is your favorite piece of that single application or your favorite feature within GitLab? I think my favorite feature within GitLab has to be the Web ID. That is just a beautiful functionality, especially for, so actually in one of my other classes, my CFO cast in class, we're working on a project with JavaScript in React. So within there, I actually was able to go into the Web ID and make some simple changes to things within GitLab because we just decided, at first we were gonna do it on GitHub and now I started advanced suite class and I was like, GitLab, let's host our project on GitLab instead that sounds like a better idea. So we did that and yeah, let's tell you about everything we use though the Web ID function and probably after that, the issue feature is really cool, especially how you can assign different issues to different people. So within a project, if you wanted to host and use it as a basic organization tool, it has that functionality. Let's also compare this two in terms of, you took computer science classes before the pandemic obviously. Right? Of course, yes. Now you're taking them, the majority of them I assume are virtual as well, now? Yes, all of them are. How did GitLab compare to the in-person classes you took at Morehouse and then how did it compare to the virtual classes you took at Morehouse? Much more organized, if you can believe that. It was much more organized. I really appreciated that. It was much easier to get any information that I needed. I feel like the way they had things set up, it felt like they were actually trying to support us throughout the semester. It was very easy to contact people when we needed them through GitLab. You guys were super responsive to everything that we needed and I really liked it more than the classes that we took. My favorite part was that you guys had the lesson plan from beginning to end already up so we could see what we were gonna learn and we stuck to it. And everything was really simple from submitting assignments to, like I said, reaching out with lectures and being able to go see the lectures that were recorded and everything. I really appreciated the way that everybody came together and supported this class. Anything else you'd like to share before we end the interview? Nothing really, I guess if I could, thanks to all the instructors, they were really great. They were super open to answering questions from us. Even when we had homework or with our merge requests when we were adding them and asking for help, they were always there to help. So really a shout out to every single one of them. They're fantastic. So you've had an opportunity to use GitLab and play around with our tool and you learned a little bit about GitLab as a company, right? Right. What roles do you think you could see yourself doing at a company like GitLab? I think I could do software, like just a software engineer and then maybe like talking to others. I think I forgot what the code of Angelist I think is what they refer to themselves as like just going and talking about GitLab and what the culture is at GitLab and what the beliefs are at GitLab because that's something that really resonated with me. Something that I feel like a lot of companies don't do very well is helping new hires become acclimated to the system. It can take a really long time sometimes and it's intimidating. But you guys encourage like pair programming a lot, not necessarily too much, but you guys definitely like have some type of documentation that like kind of outlines everything for the whole company and just like reading through about like how your view on pair programming and how important it is for junior software engineers and junior developers to be paired with somebody that's like senior to them so they can learn that. That really resonated with me. And then just your belief in documentation like everything is very well documented. It's just super helpful. That way you can go to the documentation first and then come back to somebody else if you don't understand something. I think that's super important. So being a software engineer and a code like evangelist I think are two roles that I could feel pretty well for the company just because I'm a software engineer and I also don't mind talking to other people about the company. In fact, I enjoy it if it's something that I actually believe in. This was easily my favorite class. And in terms of all like all time CS classes it definitely ranks up there. I was very engaged even with it being virtual, right? It was still very engaging. I learned a lot and yeah, it was a pretty good class overall. Looking back on it, would you recommend this class to some of your former classmates or anyone who might be like a freshman sophomore now who's thinking about computer science? Absolutely, I think that it explores a lot of like first of all, a lot of like occupation career opportunities in software engineering and computer science. And I think that's really important as someone coming into college so you can think about what you might want to do. And then in terms of like software engineering principles we definitely learned some of that. I mean, I think the classes teaches a lot, a really wide range of topics. So I think there's something in here for everyone. Nice. And I would absolutely recommend it. You mentioned this like, oh, you know possibly doing other projects in there. Now that the class is gonna be overdue foresee yourself ever using GitLab again. Yeah, I'm under the impression that GitLab is a free tool to use, correct? It's correct, it is an open source tool. There is the core or freemium version as it's sometimes used by developers that has a number of features in it that are free of charge. Yeah, so I'll definitely be using that. And since I will be developing things past this point I may end up just going ahead and getting the premium version as well because having that full access to everything still I'm sure in the future I'll be able to utilize it a little bit more. So now that you've completed the class, right? And then you've done or the different 18 lectures sort of what are your thoughts on GitLab now as a tool? And a tool for the DevOps lifecycle? Yeah, I think it's great. Actually, after the class, in one of our other classes we had a project where we had to work in groups and like come up with this but we're gonna project pretty much. And so instead of going with some other version control supplier I actually chose, I recommend a GitLab because some of the students were also in the class and we were like, yeah, we should, we wanna try this out for with an actual project. And so we did and it's been great. So I very much like it. And also at the time I was learning about continuous integration and like continuous delivery too. And the fact that that GitLab had like built in CICD was very cool to me. Like specifically I think that was one of the coolest features that stuck out to me. But yeah, I enjoy it as a tool. I think it's very nice. All right, that was excellent. I'm speechless. One word comes to mind when I hear those videos as I've done several times and that's pride. I was so proud to offer an experience to the students that will stay with them and stick with them throughout their careers. I was so proud to have a company support me in that from the proposal all the way through the implementation. I even had Tim Zahn and my senior director staying up at midnight, one o'clock in the morning teaching a class. And I was really happy with the fact that one person with a very big idea and a tremendous amount of support from the team could make such a difference and have such an impact. So I would just suggest that if anyone has an opportunity to either develop a course with the university or find some way to reach out to that next generation of engineers, specifically reaching out to those underrepresented potential future candidates, that would be great. And going to an HBCU where you have thousands of students is a lot, is very, very efficient. So thank you all today for coming and hearing my talk and please enjoy your day. Bye.