The GitLab community gathered on February 12-13 for the Q1 Hackathon and this is almost becoming a cliche, but the GitLab Community again set an impressive Hackathon record with almost 150 MRs!
What did we accomplish?
I'm not sure how many readers remember the first Hackathon in Q3'2018, but I remember being excited about 22 MRs submitted during the inaugural event. If someone told me we would see 147 MRs in a single Hackathon someday, I don't think I would have believed it. Again, I have to give big kudos to wider community members and reviewers who helped make our Hackathon such a fun and exciting event.
I would like to highlight a few things from the Hackathon. First, just like in Q4 we had frontend Epics that resulted in many community contributions. One was Replacing Underscore with Lodash created by Scott Stern and the other was to Migrate .fa-spinner to .spinner that was created by Brandon Labuschagne before the Hackathon. Amazingly, both Scott and Brandon were able to review and provide feedback on over 50 MRs related to these Epics that turned out to be goldmines.
Also during this Hackathon, there were MRs across more than 20 GitLab projects demonstrating the breadth of contributions (to go along with the volume). Not suprisingly, many people usually think of the gitlab project, but wider community members contributed to projects like Charts, Gitaly, GitLab SVGs, Gitter, Omnibus, Pajama Design System, Runner, Secure, www-gitlab-com, and others during the event.
Finally, the GitLab Meetup Group in Hamburg had their meetup to coincide with the Hackathon, so David Planella, John Coghlan, and I were able to join the Hamburg meetup remotely to talk about the Hackathon and how to contribute to GitLab. We had a great time participating in the meetup and I want to thank Philipp Westphalen for not only inviting us, but also flawlessly working the conferencing tool and the audio/video equipments. If there are other GitLab meetup organizers who are interested in organizing your meetup around a Hackathon, please let me know!
Hackathon prizes
For this Hackathon, we have a packable duffle for everyone who had their MRs merged by February 25th and 34 people will be receiving the GitLab branded duffle bag. This sets another record for the number of people with MRs merged during the Hackathon. As we did in the past several quarters, we have a prize for second place and Raihan Kabir is the winner with 7 MRs merged. For the grand prize, I want to award two contributors Takuya Noguchi with 13 MRs merged and Rajendra Kadam with 17 MRs merged. Thanks and congratulatations to everyone!
When is the next Hackathon?
I'm happy to announce that the Q2 Hackathon will take place on May 13-14, 2020. It is already advertised on the Hackathon page with a new countdown clock. Please look out for more announcements as we get closer to the next Hackathon date. Also, if you have any suggestions for the Q2 Hackathon please feel free to suggest them on the GitLab Contributors Gitter.
How do I get started with contributing?
A good place to start is the Contributing to GitLab page, where you can learn how you can contribute to GitLab code, documentation, translation, and UX design.
If you have any questions, you are always welcome to reach me at [email protected].
"GitLab application screengrab" by Pankaj Patel on Unsplash