[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":794},["ShallowReactive",2],{"/en-us/blog/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab":3,"navigation-en-us":39,"banner-en-us":439,"footer-en-us":449,"blog-post-authors-en-us-Austin Regnery":691,"blog-related-posts-en-us-why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab":705,"assessment-promotions-en-us":745,"next-steps-en-us":784},{"id":4,"title":5,"authorSlugs":6,"body":8,"categorySlug":9,"config":10,"content":14,"description":8,"extension":26,"isFeatured":12,"meta":27,"navigation":28,"path":29,"publishedDate":20,"seo":30,"stem":34,"tagSlugs":35,"__hash__":38},"blogPosts/en-us/blog/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab.yml","Why I Love Contributing To Gitlab",[7],"austin-regnery",null,"unfiltered",{"slug":11,"featured":12,"template":13},"why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab",false,"BlogPost",{"title":15,"description":16,"authors":17,"heroImage":19,"date":20,"body":21,"category":9,"tags":22},"Why I love contributing to GitLab","Making small meaningful changes is what it's all about.",[18],"Austin Regnery","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749679501/Blog/Hero%20Images/new-feature.png","2021-05-11","It was mid-morning on a Tuesday in February, and I had 10 minutes in between meetings. 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This implementation was simple to replicate since I just needed to copy/paste and replace a few words.\n![Image of Vue and Haml files with editor shortcuts](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/vue-haml.png){: .shadow}\nThe Vue and Haml files with the new shortcut\n\nI started a branch and began hacking away at the code. Now, I would never call myself a Software Engineer, but I like to try and make things from time to time. I was able to add a new shortcut to the toolbar to insert this code snippet for me in less than 10 minutes. No more memorizing! Making contributions like this is what makes working at GitLab so special.\nNow, it wasn't ready for production, but I at least had something that worked. I shared it with my UX colleagues in Slack, and it started to gain traction with several up-votes and few constructive comments on how to make it better.\nWith the functionality flushed out, a few other designers helped me get a better icon added to our SVG library. Using clear iconography is critical for communicating information more clearly.\n| Initial Icon | Final Icon |\n| - | - |\n| ![SVG of chevron right icon](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/chevron-right.svg) | ![SVG of details block icon](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/details-block.svg) |\n\nThe last thing to do was resolve my failing tests, and I had several teammates help me do that.\n![Gif of the shortcut being used](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/demo.gif)\n\nToday [this change](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/54938) merged! 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Shadow Takeaways from Jacie","Recap of my experience in the CEO Shadow Program.",[711],"Jacie Bandur","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749664102/Blog/Hero%20Images/gitlab-values-cover.png","2021-05-18","\n\n{::options parse_block_html=\"true\" /}\n\n\nHi! I’m Jacie Bandur. I completed GitLab’s CEO Shadow program from 2021-04-26 through 2021-05-07. It was a really enlightening experience. I generally work in Learning and Development and consider myself a lifelong learner. I can’t even explain how much I learned in such a short about of time. I learned a lot about the business. I learned a lot about the product. But learned even more about the importance of iteration in everything we do.\n\n### Qualifications to Participate\n\nI wanted to start this off with touching on qualifications to participate in the program.\n\nI am the type of person that has gone through most of my life thinking I’m not qualified for things. I’m not qualified for that job, that promotion, that program. The list goes on and on.\n\nWhen I saw the [CEO Shadow program](/blog/ceo-shadow-impressions-takeaways/) kick off in 2019, I really wanted to participate. I was a little intimidated. Who wouldn’t be, spending 2 weeks with the CEO of any company? But time passed and all the sudden it was 2021 and I had not taken any steps to participating in the program.\n\nIf you are sitting there waiting for someone to tell you that you are qualified to participate in this program, I’m not big on giving “pep talks,” but here’s me telling you - You are qualified for this program. There’s never going to be a good or perfect time to do it. Tell your manager you want to do the CEO Shadow program. Stop waiting. Sign up today.\n\nNote: Take a look at the [eligibility](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/shadow/#eligibility) section of the CEO Shadow page for more information on signing up.\n\n### Pre-Program Tips\n\nThere are many things recommended for shadows to do pre-program outlined on the CEO Shadow handbook page. As I was going through the program there were things that I thought helped me (or would have helped me).\n\nHere are my top 6 recommendations:\n\n1. Make sure your team knows you will be unavailable for 2 weeks. This isn’t a program that can or should be done alongside your normal day to day work. I found catching up from the 2 weeks away kind of difficult because I was trying to keep up on what was going on and I had a bunch of half done things.\n1. Talk with people who have done the shadow program - schedule at least 3 coffee chats with CEO Shadow Alumni.\n1. Have food that is easy to eat quickly. Sid’s meetings are back to back most days, so you will have small amounts of time to eat throughout the day. Sid does eat during calls, which you are welcome to do, too, but if you are taking notes, it is difficult to eat. And this will make you realize why speedy meetings are so important!\n1. Listen to the [Executive Leadership LinkedIn Learning course](https://www.linkedin.com/learning/executive-leadership/).\n1. Be prepared to ask questions. When doing the program virtually, there isn’t a ton of time for asking questions, so when one would come up, I would add it to a note on my computer and ask if there was ever time with just the shadows and Sid.\n1. Take at least 1 day off after the program. Take even a couple of days off if you can! This is recommended on the handbook page, but I can’t stress this enough.\n\n\n### Takeaways\n\n**Group Conversations**\n\nI’ve been at GitLab for almost 4 years. When I joined, I made it a point to attend as many GC’s as I could. I had gotten out of the habit of attending Group Conversations. After attending them again for 2 weeks, I realized how important they are to understand better what is going on across the business. Everything in the organization is so intertwined. It’s helpful to understand what other teams are working on and succeeding in.\n\n**Feedback**\n\nWe should all be giving and receiving feedback often. We have a whole [handbook page on giving and receiving feedback](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/guidance-on-feedback/). Read the handbook page and watch the videos, as well. Practice giving feedback. I recommend using the [1-1 agenda](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/1-1/suggested-agenda-format/) Sid uses, because Feedback is an essential piece of that agenda, and it makes feedback more of a routine thing.\n\n**Biggest Takeaway**\n\nWe have an incredible team here at GitLab, from Engineering to Product to Sales to People and all the groups in between. There are so many great ideas. I observed the constant reinforcement by Sid to start with something small and build on it. You can ALWAYS make something more complex. It’s hard to go back to something more simple when you start with something complex.\n\nA couple of quotes that I heard from Sid during the program that reinforced this point:\n\n- “Every complex system evolves from a simple system that worked.”\n- “It’s very clear what is the simple solution. We can always make it more complicated as we go on.”\n\nI know they are very similar, but they happened in different meetings on different days, so the point was reinforced repeatedly.\n\nDuring the program, I reflected on the projects that I’am working on. How many of them am I trying to do too much on before releasing. Probably all of them. When I’m working on projects in the future, I will break them down into smaller, more doable chunks. Iteration is hard - it’s a skill to be practicing constantly.\n\n\n### Overall\n\nOverall, the program was really insightful and impactful. If you haven’t participated in it yet, I cannot encourage you enough to do so!\n",{"slug":716,"featured":12,"template":13},"ceo-shadow-recap",{"content":718,"config":730},{"title":719,"description":720,"authors":721,"heroImage":723,"date":20,"body":724,"category":9,"tags":725},"Placebo Lines on the Pipeline Graph","Have you noticed the connecting lines missing on your pipelines lately? Here's why",[722],"Sam Beckham","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749679507/Blog/Hero%20Images/ci-cd.png","\n\n{::options parse_block_html=\"true\" /}\n\n\n\nHave you ever pressed the close door button on the elevator, in the hope that you'll save a few precious seconds?\nOr got frustrated at the person stood next to you at the cross-walk, neglecting to press the button?\nWell, maybe they know something you don't, or perhaps you know this already.\nMany buttons in our society lie to us.\n[David McRaney](https://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/02/10/placebo-buttons/) dubbed these, \"Placebo buttons\" and they're everywhere.\nThose elevator doors won't close any faster and the cross-walk button has no effect on the lights.\nThe only lights they control are the lights on the buttons themselves.\nThey give you the feedback you crave, but that's all they're doing.\n\nThese placebos aren't constrained to the physical world, they're prevalent in [UI design](/blog/the-evolution-of-ux-at-gitlab/) too.\nFrom literal placebo buttons like [YouTube's downvote](https://www.quora.com/Does-downvoting-a-comment-on-YouTube-even-do-anything), to more subtle effects like Instagram always [pretending to work](https://www.fastcompany.com/1669788/the-3-white-lies-behind-instagrams-lightning-speed), or progress bars that have a [fixed animation](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/why-some-apps-use-fake-progress-bars/517233/).\nThey're everywhere if you know where to look.\n\nAt GitLab, we created a placebo of our own in one of our core features; the pipeline graph.\n\nThose of you who have used our pipeline graph, will be familiar with its appearance.\nThere's a series of jobs, grouped by stages, connected by a series of lines depicting the relationships between the jobs.\nBut these lines might be lying to you.\nThese lines are indiscriminately drawn between each job in a stage, regardless of their relationship.\nThese lines are placebos.\n\n![The old pipeline rendering with lines connecting every job in a stage](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/placebo-lines_old-graph.png)\n\nThis wasn't a problem to begin with.\nA basic pipeline has several jobs across a handful of stages.\nJobs in each stage would run parallel to each other, but each stage would run sequentially.\nIn the image shown above, all the jobs in the test stage would trigger at the same time. Once those jobs had finished, all the jobs in the build stage would trigger.\nWe used rudimentary CSS to draw lines connecting each job in one stage to each job in the next.\nThese lines weren't calculated based on their connections, but still reflected the story they were telling.\n\nSince the introduction of `needs` relationships in [v12.2](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/-/issues/47063), pipelines got a bit more complicated.\nNow you could configure a job in a later stage to trigger as soon as a job in an earlier stage completed.\nLooking at our old example, we could set the API deployment to run as soon as our spec tests passed.\nThis skips the remaining tests and the entire build stage, turning our lines into pretty little liars.\n\nWe had many internal discussions about these lines, and how to show the relationships between jobs.\nThere's the [`needs` visualization](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/directed_acyclic_graph/#needs-visualization), which does an excellent job of displaying these relationships, but the main pipeline graph was still inaccurate.\nFor the past few months, we've been [refactoring the pipeline graph](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/276949), giving it a new lease of life and fixing some of its issues along the way.\nOne of those issues were the faked lines.\nIn the new version, we can accurately draw lines between jobs.\nLines that actually depict the relationships jobs have with each other.\nNow the lines no-longer lie!\n\n![The newer pipeline graph showing the correct needs links between jobs](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/placebo-lines_new-graph.png)\n\nThe above image shows an unreleased version of the pipeline graph.\nYou can see the lines drawn between the jobs to show that the `deploy:API` job can start as soon as the `rspec` job is successful.\nSomething the old lines (shown earlier in this post) would have been unable to depict.\n\nOne unfortunate downside of this is that these lines can be quite expensive to calculate.\nThey're actual DOM nodes, drawn deliberately and placed precisely.\nOn smaller graphs this isn't a problem, but some of our initial tests have found pipelines with a potential 8000+ job connections.\nThat kind of calculation would grind the browser to a halt, and nobody wants that.\n\nAt GitLab, we believe in boring solutions.\nWe make the simple change that sets us on the path towards where we want to be.\nShip it, get feedback, and iterate.\nSo that's what we did.\nIn the first phase of this rollout, we shipped the new pipeline graph with no lines connecting the jobs.\nWe don't have to worry about the expensive calculations, and we still get to roll out the refactored pipeline graph.\n\n![The current (v13.11) pipeline graph showing no links between jobs](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/placebo-lines_current-graph.png)\n\nWe know some of you will miss them, but fear not.\nBoring solutions are just technical debt if you don't iterate on them.\nSo the [improved lines are coming](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/4509) in a future release, along with several other improvements to the pipeline graph.\nWe're already starting to roll out the new [Job Dependencies](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/298973) view which shows the jobs in a (much closer to) execution order.\nStay tuned for more updates, and watch [Sarah Groff Hennigh Palermo's talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2EKqKjB7OQ) for the technical side of this effort and a deeper dive into some of the decisions we made.\n",[726,727,728,729],"CI","frontend","agile","design",{"slug":731,"featured":12,"template":13},"placebo-lines-on-the-pipeline-graph",{"content":733,"config":743},{"title":734,"description":735,"authors":736,"heroImage":738,"date":739,"body":740,"category":9,"tags":741},"Auto DevOps: Where we are and where we are headed","As we will soon start an Auto DevOps design sprint, this article aims to summarize our current knowledge about Auto DevOps, and sets the stage for future discussions.",[737],"Viktor Nagy","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749679516/Blog/Hero%20Images/gitlab-11-0-released-cover.jpg","2021-05-05","\n\n{::options parse_block_html=\"true\" /}\n\n\n\nAuto DevOps is an advanced GitLab feature-set that leverages GitLab's [single application](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/product/categories/gitlab-the-product/single-application/) to assist users in every phase of the development and delivery process, implementing automatic tasks that can be customized and refined to get the best fit for their needs. The Three Ways of DevOps put forward a rigorous flow of work from development to production, short and amply feedback loops to fix quality issues early and avoid rework, and a culture of learning by balanced experimentation and repetition. GitLab, as a technological solution, can help with the first two ways, and can make the cultural changes less heavy and costly. Auto DevOps is our solution to support DevOps best practices with a convention over configuration approach.\n\n## A Bit of History\n\nAuto DevOps was released in GitLab 11.0, on 22. June 2018. From the very beginning, it included License Management, Security tests, and support for Kubernetes deployments. In the past years, the Auto DevOps offering was extended in many ways, and today [it ties together 15 stages](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/topics/autodevops/stages.html) from building a project to deploying it. Besides being \"Auto\" as in automatic, it supports [a vast array of customization possibilities](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/topics/autodevops/customize.html) too.\n\nThroughout these years, the goal of Auto DevOps remained the same: to simplify DevOps best practices adoption at every organisation.\n\n## Feedback we have heard\n\nAfter running a dozen interviews with our customers, I have noticed a few emerging patterns that I would like to share with you:\n\n### It's highly valued\n\nFirst of all, Auto DevOps is highly valued by our users. I talked with customers who were transitioning from legacy infrastructure to Kubernetes, and after 2 years of transitioning are looking forward to start using Auto DevOps with its built-in security scanners and review apps support. We have a great market to serve, and this is an amazing position to be at!\n\n### Auto DevOps utilized as exemplar templates\n\nFor various reasons, many customers find Auto DevOps to be unsuitable as-is. In these cases, it's considered as a set of GitLab CI templates that platform engineers can look at and learn from as they build out their own Auto DevOps forks. While we think it's great that these customers have found value in our Auto DevOps templates, we'd much rather create a solution that fulfills their needs without them having to write and maintain these templates forever.\n\n### Auto DevOps is slow\n\nAn often heard problem with Auto DevOps pipelines is that they are slow. Especially, its Auto Testing features, which end up getting switched off for this reason. One of the core principles of DevOps is to have a fast feedback loop; slow pipelines are counter to that principles and are therefore unacceptable. Our solution should accept this as a basic tenant and requirement.\n\n### Auto DevOps is hard to troubleshoot\n\nInherent in its name, it seems to be an automatic solution. While in actuality, it's a rather complex product with many pieces having to fit together just right to get it to work. As a result, if something goes wrong, then our users often turn to GitLab support for assistance. This is especially problematic, as erroneous configurations usually happen when Auto DevOps is tried out for the first time. Leading to a negative first impression. We should be able to provide a better experience by putting more effort into its onboarding flow.\n\n### Auto DevOps does not scale well\n\nMany GitLab users who claim that they use Auto DevOps actually use a forked version of it that incorporates custom CI templates, some Auto DevOps templates, and some custom logic too. In these situations, every new project created requires the redundant setup of these custom templates, because simply enabling Auto DevOps would only use the GitLab templates. This can be a problem in larger organizations, with dedicated platform teams, because they often have a requirement for standardization to simplify their engineering team's life. The current state of Auto DevOps does not serve this need well.\n\n### Auto DevOps targets only Kubernetes\n\nFor a long time, the only supported deployment target for Auto DevOps was Kubernetes. This has changed in the past year with her additional support of AWS EC2 and ECS. Nevertheless, we still do not support application stores for mobile development, simple package creation, Lambda function, etc. On one hand, Kubernetes already restricts Auto DevOps to a special set of companies where there is likely a central platform team, while on the other hand, we don't have support for platform team-level customizations. At the same time, we were missing support for the most common deployment targets without a platform team.\n\n## Who is the target user\n\nThe patterns show that there are two different user types (aka personas) for Auto DevOps:\n\n- There are the bigger companies with standardized processes and a dedicated platform team that owns these processes. This team is responsible for every developer teams' pipelines and their primary job is to allow developers to focus only on developing the business logic, instead of working on deployments and infrastructure. These platform teams require a product that enables them to apply special company policies automatically to every project that works. While Auto DevOps allows many customizations, those customizations are brittle to changes in GitLab, and we don't have special logic in using these customized setups automatically.\n\n- Then there are smaller companies, without a dedicated platform team. In these situations, usually, a lead engineer wears the platform engineer hat and takes care of the pipelines from the initial build through various scanners and non-production deployments to the final production deployment. These teams don't mind following our conventions as long as our solution doesn't require much time from them to get started while also supporting their deployment targets. Tools like Heroku, Vercel, or Netlify already paved the way for this approach.\n\n## What's next\n\nIn the past 3 years, we have learned a lot about our users, this allows us to take a new look at Auto DevOps, and see how we can best serve our users' current goals and needs. For this reason, we're planning on running a Design Sprint in the coming month to determine the new direction and come up with a solution that will help teams to more easily adopt DevSecOps best practices. While moving through this journey we would love for you to [join the discussion on the Reimagining Auto DevOps epic](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/5148)... in the meantime, thank you for reading and I hope you're all as excited as we are to move Auto DevOps back to the future!\n",[546,742],"customers",{"slug":744,"featured":12,"template":13},"auto-devops-where-we-are-and-where-we-are-headed",{"promotions":746},[747,761,772],{"id":748,"categories":749,"header":751,"text":752,"button":753,"image":758},"ai-modernization",[750],"ai-ml","Is AI achieving its promise at scale?","Quiz will take 5 minutes or less",{"text":754,"config":755},"Get your AI maturity score",{"href":756,"dataGaName":757,"dataGaLocation":243},"/assessments/ai-modernization-assessment/","modernization assessment",{"config":759},{"src":760},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138786/qix0m7kwnd8x2fh1zq49.png",{"id":762,"categories":763,"header":764,"text":752,"button":765,"image":769},"devops-modernization",[24,559],"Are you just managing tools or shipping innovation?",{"text":766,"config":767},"Get your DevOps maturity score",{"href":768,"dataGaName":757,"dataGaLocation":243},"/assessments/devops-modernization-assessment/",{"config":770},{"src":771},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138785/eg818fmakweyuznttgid.png",{"id":773,"categories":774,"header":776,"text":752,"button":777,"image":781},"security-modernization",[775],"security","Are you trading speed for security?",{"text":778,"config":779},"Get your security maturity score",{"href":780,"dataGaName":757,"dataGaLocation":243},"/assessments/security-modernization-assessment/",{"config":782},{"src":783},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138786/p4pbqd9nnjejg5ds6mdk.png",{"header":785,"blurb":786,"button":787,"secondaryButton":792},"Start building faster today","See what your team can do with the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps.\n",{"text":788,"config":789},"Get your free trial",{"href":790,"dataGaName":50,"dataGaLocation":791},"https://gitlab.com/-/trial_registrations/new?glm_content=default-saas-trial&glm_source=about.gitlab.com/","feature",{"text":495,"config":793},{"href":54,"dataGaName":55,"dataGaLocation":791},1772652106677]