Stories From Our Community – Keynote

Hi, my name is Ray Paik, and I manage the code contributor program at GitLab. I hope you're enjoying the conference. As you well know, GitLab is also an open source community.

You probably heard a lot of talks about community during the conference, but when people typically hear open source community, they usually think of programmers and developers. And we certainly have a lot of programmers and developers that have been contributing to GitLab. You probably heard that we surpassed 3000 computer contributor mark a few months ago, which we celebrated.

But in addition to code, we have a lot of people that are helping us improve our documentation. And we also have over two thousand people that have helped translate GitLab into dozens of different languages. Also, we have meet ups in over twenty five countries worldwide with over 10000 members.

com, you'll get a chance to meet with 15000 plus other members that are sharing their experiences using GitLab. And also they might be able to help answer your questions. In addition, we have people that are writing about GitLab sharing their experiences and best practices either through blogs or articles.

And if you go to a lot of different conferences, including this one, you'll hear a lot of community members also giving a lot of talks about GitLab. So all these insights and feedback community members provide definitely helps improve our product. But I also want to stress that they also help improve our community so that everyone feels welcome when they join.

They're making sure that their voices and their contributions are valued and ultimately they have a sense of belonging when they join the community. In the past few years, since I've been at GitLab, we've made a lot of progress, not just in terms of the number of people that are in the community, but making sure our our our community improves and a lot of vector's. But like all open source projects, we still have a lot of work to do.

And we still I think we still can do a better job of lowering their barrier to entry so that it's easier for people to join and also making it easier for community members to connect with each other, including GitLab team members, and last but not least, also helping improve the diversity of the community. That's an ongoing challenge that we want to continue to work on. But based on what I've seen over the past few years, I'm very optimistic.

We'll not only see the growth in numbers, but helping a more inclusive community is something I'm confident that that we can continue to make progress on. I want to switch gears here a bit and talk about our community members. One of the favorite part of my job is being able to connect with and actually have conversations with with a lot of our community members of the wider community.

And what I'm finding out over the especially over the past year or so, even if people are mostly contributing code, helping improve our product, what I'm hearing over and over again is that they're not only appreciate the opportunity to make technical contributions and even broaden their technical knowledge, but they appreciate the opportunity to form relationships and connections with other members of the community, including GitLab team members. So they really appreciate the opportunity and opportunity to expand their networks. So that's what I'd be hearing a lot over the past year or so.

And we want to make sure that that's that's easy to do. What I wanted to do in the rest of the time is I wanted to introduce some of our community members. We have community members all from different continents with different backgrounds and experiences I wanted to share their.

I asked them to share their story on their journey to joining the GitLab community and what they learned by being part of the community over the past few years for some of the people. So I'm going to stop here and I'll let our community members share their stories. Oh, hey, I'm Rajinder I work as a backhand engineer BrothersTech , I am based out of Mumbai, India.

Currently I'm working with the open source teams of BrothersTech so much of my time is spent around contributing to selenium full time and hope to contribute to soon to Mozilla browser and prior to this. So this is my first company I joined in 2018. Prior to this, I was a Google summer of code student, so that's when I was introduced to the world of open source and I haven't looked back since then.

So even after starting my full time job, whatever free time I used to get used to, you know, to search for projects, looking to contribute and learn from them, because open source is of the community, something where you can learn a lot about. So I stumbled upon GitLab during that time, my search for the projects, and that's when I started. It's been a year and it's been one amazing ride till now.

I have over 200 merge requests merging to master at GitLab and I hope to do it. I hope to do more soon as in when I get time. So contributing to GitLab has been like working on a second project altogether during my free time during the weekends.

And I have like got to learn so much about the projects, so much about writing good code, writing, having good architecture. And I think that's what keeps me motivated to contribute to GitLab. And every MR has been learning so far and I haven't had any boring days so far by contributing to GitLab.

So, yeah, that's pretty much about it. And hope to see you soon. Hello, my name is Carol.

I'm 22 years old from Brazil. I'm a computer science student at the State University of Rio de Janeiro and backhand intern. But I do frontend contributions to GitLab, uh, get is my first open source project.

I discovered how to contribute through my sister, uh, who has a developer friend, now works at GitLab. He mentored me how on how to contribute. And I've been contributing together for seven months now.

And it's been an awesome experience because I'm learning a lot of for example, I learned how to do merger requests for properly and rebase and how the pipeline works with a huge project like GitLab. And it's totally awesome. That's it bye.

Hi, this is Mavni software developer from Uganda and I've been contributing to open source since 2014. I set it out as a proposal open source contributor and I used to submit purchase to the source code and that's when they fell in love with the idea of contributing to open source. So I, I joined a couple of other open source communities such as Mozilla Firefox's of ballots student ambassador.

I used to organize meetups and localized applications. So last year when I was using GitLab, I stumbled onto the help icon and I was able to click onto and contribute to GitLab link, which I read the instructions and I was able to submit my first MR. The thing I loved about submitting an MR to get was the feedback that I go to the MR.

And one of the things that I could be contributing to GitLab is the interpersonal relationships that you get build with the reviewers and the maintainers and the knowledge that gets to be shared. Also, in these Mrs that I work on, I find it to be priceless and quite useful to me in my career as a developer. Hello everyone.

Big welcome from Queensland, Australia. My name is Vladimír and I've been using open source for many, many years. NET Projects working with Oracle databases and eventually our testing team needed some rapid prototyping tool to push test cases in.

And that's why we discovered Joomla. And that time I was amazed. I can use already existing system and expand it rather than build everything from scratch.

That really changed my world. The next big milestone was when I actually discovered Drupal somewhere in 2009 and that became the system to go to for the next ten years. I'm still using it on a daily basis.

Drupal helped me to grow as a developer, contributor, teacher. It helped me learn about communities, the power of communities and how we can build free software and give it back to the world. Along came GitLab.

And that was amazing because Drupal by itself is amazing system. It's like a laga, but it's missing something like somewhere you can put your Lego pieces in. So I needed something to investigate continuous integration, continuous delivery at the time, and my clients were struggling was to a really good project management.

For some reason they can use multiple tools and GitLab can fill their needs. And from then on, I was using GitLab every day. It helped my clients to really sort out project management was it's easy to go user interface and for me, it helped to learn and build on top of.

Continuous integration, continuous delivery, helping to deliver my project and, you know, sleep night. And that's a big thing if you think about it. How many projects would allow you to sleep at night?

And for me, it was open source and in particular, GitLab and Drupal.