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Gitlab Handbook's HN Page

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Re: Gitlab Handbook's HN Page

#191

Post by lkozloff »

atonse wrote: post #44

GitLab's been good for our company, having it all under one roof has been nice. But recently I've had (and continue to have... still not resolved) a pretty unpleasant experience with their support software. It just seems like the typical comedy of errors where a series of software integration papercuts between them and Zendesk adds up to a really bad experience, made much worse by the fact that our issue hasn't been…

Hi @atonse - I'm a Senior Manager at GitLab Support. I appreciate you taking the time to put together your feedback. I'm happy to discuss the particularities of your support experience if you send me an email at lkozloff[at]gitlab.com

There's a couple of general points though that I'd love to comment on.

> Why can't I just SSO using my GitLab credentials into Zendesk?

I'd love to have this as well - it makes complete sense (especially for our SaaS customers - it wouldn't help as much for self-managed). In order to get it implemented we need GitLab.com to become a SAML or JSON Web Token source. We have an open feature request for that here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/238419

Even with that implemented we'd still have some challenges identifying who should be getting support without occasionally asking for proof of a support contract. As you said, you're part of multiple GitLab groups. It's well possible that some of those are on our Free tier and others on Paid tiers. In some contexts you'd be eligible for Support, and in others you might not be.

Usually this speed bump only hits the first time you contact support. Once you've opened a ticket we'll have you linked up correctly.

Recently I've been working on improving contact management and making sure customers are aware of what they can do to make their first support ticket the best experience it can be. You can track that effort in https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-com/support/-/epics/156

> Why use terms like "Support Entitlement" – just say, which org/group are you with?

We have to consider both our self-managed customers and SaaS customers with our language. For GitLab.com customers naming a path completely works (and is one of the ways you can prove your entitlement: https://about.gitlab.com/support/managing-support-contacts.h...). For Self-managed we have to map account names exactly and need a bit more as some organizations have visibility of tickets between users, in which there may be sensitive data.

I think you're right that it could sound more human. I've opened up https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support/support-team-meta/-/is... to discuss improvements.

If you have any thoughts, feel free to participate!

Re: Gitlab Handbook's HN Page

#192

Post by Gigachad »

djhn wrote: post #158
Gigachad wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are services constantly scraping all public social medias and you pay them some small fee and they let you subscribe to keywords. Of course they might miss some video content but it isn't terribly significant.

Any recommendations?

It's been a long time since I did it so I don't know. Used one to monitor the name of my open source project once.

Re: Gitlab Handbook's HN Page

#193

Post by splittingTimes »

john_cogs wrote: post #13

Hey there, I’m a member of the GitLab Community Relations team. My team is responsible for this page. I shared the page today at a DevRel meetup where OP was presenting on Hacker News. I’m grateful he chose to share it with all of you. Thanks, Dan. If there are ways we can improve how we engage with the HN community, myself and our team would love your feedback.

Hi John,

A bit off topic, but if I would like to introduce such a handbook on my team as well, what technology does it use? It looks and feels so much fresher, clean and responsive than a simple wiki. I see it is markdown files with some CSS, but what engine do you use to build and render the handbook.

Is there a repo that holds the template to set up such a handbook?

Cheers and congrats. Always admired how you kept all your employees engaged with the handbook to not have it deteriorate, but thrive.

Re: Gitlab Handbook's HN Page

#194

Post by anthonyjdella »

dnsmichi wrote: post #188
john_cogs wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your interest. Given we are so transparent, it seems that most folks who conduct interviews at GitLab expect candidates to have done a fair bit of research in advance of the interviews. So if you're looking to join the Developer Evangelism team, brushing up on our handbook and familiarizing yourself with what we do would be a good idea. That will allow you to come to the interview prepared to frame your ex…

Sharing my personal experience, not speaking for GitLab here: One thing I did when I was excited about the Developer Evangelist role: I started writing a document in the open, collecting thoughts what I learned, what I want to do, and which ideas could help this drive forward. Markdown, Web IDE, Git commits. Don't check the commit times, they might be at 3am in the morning from an iPad :-) https://gitlab.com/dnsmichi…

Thanks Michael! Great repo, I'll be checking it out

Re: Gitlab Handbook's HN Page

#195

Post by kevincox »

djhn wrote: post #157
nisegami wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linked page says they use Zapier to post in slack when GitLab is mentioned on HN.

You're right, the text does mention Zapier, but what triggers Zapier? Zapier is glue that ties various services together. The web scraper and keyword detection is either a different service or in-house.

It could use hnrss.org and zapier just pulls in the feed.

Re: Gitlab Handbook's HN Page

#196

Post by dnsmichi »

dnsmichi wrote: post #159
nisegami wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linked page says they use Zapier to post in slack when GitLab is mentioned on HN.

More on Zapier workflows: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati... I saw your message in Slack, GitLab Developer Evangelist waving from Germany :)

I figured that the HN handbook does not link the Zapier workflows page.

Fixed in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_request...

Re: Gitlab Handbook's HN Page

#197

Post by atonse »

lkozloff wrote: post #191
atonse wrote: post #44

GitLab's been good for our company, having it all under one roof has been nice. But recently I've had (and continue to have... still not resolved) a pretty unpleasant experience with their support software. It just seems like the typical comedy of errors where a series of software integration papercuts between them and Zendesk adds up to a really bad experience, made much worse by the fact that our issue hasn't been…

Hi @atonse - I'm a Senior Manager at GitLab Support. I appreciate you taking the time to put together your feedback. I'm happy to discuss the particularities of your support experience if you send me an email at lkozloff[at]gitlab.com There's a couple of general points though that I'd love to comment on. > Why can't I just SSO using my GitLab credentials into Zendesk? I'd love to have this as well - it makes complete…

Thank you for your really detailed and thoughtful response (not surprising coming from your company). Someone did reach out to me and this might get resolved after all this got escalated.

I'll keep an eye on these issues and will reach out at some point. The support entitlement stuff is more about just using plain English language. Most users don't know what that means. I'm the owner of the org and I barely know what that means.

Re: Gitlab Handbook's HN Page

#198

Post by thewoolleyman »

splittingTimes wrote: post #193
john_cogs wrote: post #13

Hey there, I’m a member of the GitLab Community Relations team. My team is responsible for this page. I shared the page today at a DevRel meetup where OP was presenting on Hacker News. I’m grateful he chose to share it with all of you. Thanks, Dan. If there are ways we can improve how we engage with the HN community, myself and our team would love your feedback.

Hi John, A bit off topic, but if I would like to introduce such a handbook on my team as well, what technology does it use? It looks and feels so much fresher, clean and responsive than a simple wiki. I see it is markdown files with some CSS, but what engine do you use to build and render the handbook. Is there a repo that holds the template to set up such a handbook? Cheers and congrats. Always admired how you kept…

TL;DR: It is a JAMStack-style static site, which we publish with the Middleman static site editor.

However, there's a lot more to it than that, and it's always actively evolving.

There's not currently a page which summarizes the architecture, but there are multiple pages and docs which are focused on processes around editing and maintaining the site. Here is a link which is a good starting point to see what's under the covers and how we use it: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/git-page-update/#11-start-...

HTH! -- Chad

Re: Gitlab Handbook's HN Page

#199

Post by ayewo »

anthonyjdella wrote: post #107
john_cogs wrote: post #13

Hey there, I’m a member of the GitLab Community Relations team. My team is responsible for this page. I shared the page today at a DevRel meetup where OP was presenting on Hacker News. I’m grateful he chose to share it with all of you. Thanks, Dan. If there are ways we can improve how we engage with the HN community, myself and our team would love your feedback.

Hey John, I'm interested in DevRel and Evangelism on your team. I've read some of your documentation and enjoyed what I've read. I'm a dev of 5 years and I'd like to apply to your team. Could you give me some pointers and tips about the interviews? Thanks!

In case you are looking to spray and pray by applying to multiple places, I maintain a list of several open devrel roles: https://ayewo.com/exploding-career-opportunities-in-devrel/

Re: Gitlab Handbook's HN Page

#200

Post by dnsmichi »

wodenokoto wrote: post #113
john_cogs wrote: post #13

Hey there, I’m a member of the GitLab Community Relations team. My team is responsible for this page. I shared the page today at a DevRel meetup where OP was presenting on Hacker News. I’m grateful he chose to share it with all of you. Thanks, Dan. If there are ways we can improve how we engage with the HN community, myself and our team would love your feedback.

Devrel and evangelist is that a full time job or is it something a developer gets time off to do? I think we’re I’m going is, when we see “Hi it’s Jon/Jane from gitlab …” is it a developer taking time out of their day to respond or is it a full time marketing person?

Adding my thoughts to resources shared in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30005358

> I think we’re I’m going is, when we see “Hi it’s Jon/Jane from gitlab …” is it a developer taking time out of their day to respond or is it a full time marketing person?

When you see someone writing "Hi, Michael from GitLab here" it is not always a Developer Evangelist or a Community Relations team member. Everyone at GitLab can join the conversation here on Hacker News :)

John shared this thread with all team members in Slack, and Chad Wooley joined to answer the question how the handbook is built in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30043995 Another example is Lyle Kozloff helping answer a support related question in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30015461

You will see the Developer Evangelism team engage more often, as it is defined in the responsibilities (https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati...). The team currently covers PT, ET, CET timezones. I am located in Germany, CET.

> Devrel and evangelist is that a full time job or is it something a developer gets time off to do?

Developer Evangelists at GitLab have an engineering background, everyone has their own experience and preferences though. For example, I feel much more confident in C/C++, Go and Python, and want to learn Ruby on Rails, and Rust.

Potentially there's room to go more into detail in the team members overview: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati... - all team member profiles are linked, where more social profiles are available. I'm using 'dnsmichi' nearly everywhere, keeping things simple.

Speaking for myself:

I was a maintainer of an OSS monitoring tool from 2009-2020, and love diving into backend engineering and Ops topics. At some point, I was doing development, community building, support, social media and marketing. And a bit of Developer Relations with speaking at events. This did not work out so well in 2019 in my previous job doing all of that, where other companies have different teams and multiple people for.

Then I saw the Developer Evangelist role at GitLab later in November 2019 in a tweet from Sid (https://poly.work/h/11Rk7Jqw), and toyed with a full time job, switching gears from full-time development to full-time developer relations / advocacy / evangelism. Friends had gone on their adventure too, Philipp Krenn from Elastic has been a great role model.

I made ambitious plans and took many notes in https://gitlab.com/dnsmichi/tech-evangelism preparing for my role, and got an offer to join GitLab in March 2020. It's been an exciting, wild ride in the past ~2 years. Not everything went well - I learned a lot from a comparison blog post discussed here on HN, and keep reflecting on how we can create better helpful content for everyone to benefit. Details in https://www.polywork.com/dnsmichi/highlights/a6f10cbf-515d-4...

I'm doing many things, sometimes too many, requiring me to refine scope and focus on the important topics. For example, 2022 will be a strong theme for Observability and OpenTelemetry, app instrumentation for developers and CI/CD Observability. I've started activities with launching a new community learning website on https://o11y.love/ and feature implementation ideas for CI/CD Observability in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/338943

A general problem in Developer Relations can be the feeling of not being successful, sometimes also called "imposter syndrome". I never thought that it could reach me, though I am reflecting on how to avoid these situations and keep writing my own "diary" / "log" in a timeline what I do. There are often small highlights which can make your day :) I have shared thoughts about it in a blog post which also dives more into Developer Relations activities: https://dnsmichi.at/2022/01/20/how-polywork-helps-devrel/

Hope this insight into my story and motivation helps :)

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