Frontend Group

Teams

Frontend domain experts

You can find engineers with expertise in various frontend domains on the engineering projects page under the following sections:

You can reach out to these experts to get help on:

  • discussing and defining the architecture of complex frontend features.
  • frontend technical topics like Vue, GraphQL, CSS, testing, tooling, etc.
  • proposing changes to the cross-domain frontend architecture via an RFC.
  • Questions about the frontend for a product area like design management, merge requests, pipelines, etc.

Frontend group calls

The frontend group has scheduled weekly calls every Tuesday. Since 2021-06-01, these occur at three staggered, time zone friendly times, repeating every three weeks. During these calls, team members are encouraged to share information that may be relevant to share with other members synchronously (Eg. new documentation change, new breaking changes added to master).

To help identify possible conflict areas in a release we encourage members to post a link to a comment in an issue that you’re working on that crosses the borders of the domain of your stage group that you feel has the potential of colliding with the work of others.

Frontend themed call

Each call may include a themed competition at the end, run by the designated DRI.

The purpose of these themes is to add some fun and quirkiness to our team calls (so that we can learn more about each other) but it shouldn’t distract or derail into too much off-topic conversation.

Process

The DRI drives the themed portion of the call, and assigns the winner as the next DRI for that time zone.

  1. The DRI decides the theme for the next call for the same time zone, i.e., in three weeks’ time.
  2. The DRI announces the theme in the #frontend Slack channel at least one day in advance.
  3. On the next call, at the end of the agenda, the DRI announces the theme and invites participants to share/vocalize their entries.
  4. After all entries have been shared, the DRI asks everyone to write which person they liked the answer the most on the meeting’s zoom chat without sending.
  5. After everyone has written down their vote, the DRI counts down from 3, and on 0 everyone hits enter, sharing their answer at the same time (to prevent voting bias).
  6. The entry with the most votes becomes the winner. In the case of a tie, the winners decide which of them becomes the DRI. In case they didn’t decide, the DRI can chime in on the decision.
  7. The DRI creates an MR to update the table of history below.
  8. The DRI replaces their own name with the winner’s as the next DRI in the agenda document (internal).
  9. goto 1
Date Theme Winner
2018-01-09 Most interesting hat Jose Ivan Vargas
2018-02-13 Most interesting shirt/t-shirt (No GitLab swag) Winnie
2018-03-06 Most interesting sunglasses André
2018-04-03 Most peculiar trip souvenir Eric Eastwood
2018-05-08 Grow the best grass or plant (preferably grass) Lukas
2018-06-04 Most interesting sculpture from one piece of paper (maximum size Letter/A4) Sam
2018-07-10 Ornament/Trinket/Thing-that-you-have, that says the most about you Sam
2018-08-07 Most creative Tanuki in any medium Eric Eastwood
2018-09-04 Best animal sketch/drawing Winnie’s wife
2018-10-02 Favorite mythical creature of your home country Tim / Lukas
2018-11-06 Convince us that your favorite dish (that you can prepare yourself) is the best! Preferably you share the recipe Mike
2018-12-04 Favorite multi-player game (board game, card game, video game, etc). Describe the rules, how many players, background, and why you like it Winnie
2019-01-08 Favorite children’s book Nathan
2019-02-05 Best feature of your house/office/co-working space. If possible, show it!

Some examples:
- The ocean view from your living room window
- Your room exclusively dedicated to Star Wars memorabilia
- The secret passage you built behind a bookcase
André
2019-03-05 Favourite music album of all time? Fatih
2019-04-02 Best picture you took (Feel free to post-edit) André
2019-05-07 skipped due to GitLab Contribute
2019-06-04 What’s your favourite movie? Sam
2019-07-02 Show us your pets Sarah
2019-08-06 Share your favorite piece of art: painting, photograph, sculpture, installation, etc. Himanshu
2019-09-03 What is your favourite “What is your favourite?” question? What would you ask? How would you answer it yourself? Sarah
2019-10-01 What is your favorite thing to complain about? Lukas
2019-11-12 What is the best dish you have ever eaten at a restaurant? Dennis
2019-12-10 What is your favorite thing about your hometown? It can be a little-known secret, awesome restaurant, famous story André, Eipi, Coung and Jiaan
2020-01-07 If you could time travel, when would you go and why? Sam
2020-02-04 What (un)usual hobby do you have? Andrew
2020-03-03 What is your favourite food to make? Chris B
2020-04-06 What do you listen to while you are working? Coung
2020-05-05 What skill would you like to master? Andrew
2020-06-02 Describe your perfect date Sam
2020-07-07 Which historical figure would you most like to go for a drink with? ?
2020-08-04 Favorite Pizza Toppings (Wrong Answers Only) Angelo
2020-09-01 Movie / TV Series line you would use in a Merge Request ?
2020-10-20 Spooktacular (Special Halloween edition) Alexander Turinske
2021-03-02 What’s your favourite childhood movie? Or the one you’ve watched the most times? Frédéric C.
2021-04-06 If you could have a super power, what would it be? (No matter what anyone says, being rich is not a superpower, sorry Batman)? Lena H-K.
2021-05-11 If you were not a software engineer, what would you do? Lukas Eipert
2021-06-01 What was the worst haircut you ever had? Sheldon
2021-06-22 What’s the piece of tech you miss the most? Paul S
2021-08-17 A kilobyte of fun Mark
2021-10-05 What’s the most mind-blowing fact you’ve ever learned? Miguel
2022-07-26 What’s the best swag (from any company) you’ve ever gotten or seen, and why? Kushal
2022-08-16 If you got a chance to watch (re-watch) a movie in theater (a movie that released before year 2000), which one would you pick? No winners, we are all made equal and deserve love

Frontend calendar

The frontend Google Calendar was created as a means of unifying and including team members on frontend related discussions. Frontend meetings should be listed on the calendar unless there is a good reason not to. Frontend engineers have the calendar permissions to create events on this calendar while GitLab team-members have the permissions to add the frontend calendar to their calendar.

Note: Due to a bug on Google Calendar, team members are unable to find the calendar by searching. Team members are recommended to go to the frontend calendar link on their browser to add this calendar to their calendar. This calendar is currently only available within GitLab and is not publicly accessible.

RFCs for changes to GitLab Frontend

If you would like to propose a new, or a change to an existing, frontend pattern in our codebase, please create an issue in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/frontend/rfcs so that we can discuss it.

Videos

Frontend Skillsharing Initiative

A good way to learn from the collective wisdom of our Frontend team is by checking out the videos available on the Skillsharing Initiative page.

Frontend Onboarding

Here are some helpful resources that might help your onboarding.

Technical Interview Metrics

Learn more about how we measure our technical interview metrics in the interview metrics page


Interview Metrics - Frontend
Our team is consistently iterating on building a more robust technical interview process so that we can: raise the bar using data improve interviewer consistency (interviewer names are encrypted in the dashboard) reduce unconscious bias by standardizing the way we evaluate each candidate For the sake of transparency, we are making our metrics dashboard publicly available with data up to the last month.
Skillsharing - Frontend
Here we document our efforts of coordinating and facilitating the production of content to improve the sharing of common skills amongst the Frontend group—maybe even other groups. Note: These efforts should not be a replacement of technical documentation but an addition. How to help? There are two main ways you can help. 1. Creating issues / requests Create issues on the project of things you’d either like to share with others or things you’d like others to share with you.
Last modified December 5, 2023: Move frontend pages in to place (67e1fccd)