Following the success of the inaugural GitLab Hackathon in September, the GitLab community again gathered on Nov. 14-15 for the Q4 hackathon. Many first-time contributors also participated in this event and the community contribution far exceeded what we saw from the first Hackathon.
So what did we accomplish?
One of the key goals of the event was to encourage community members to contribute Merge Requests (MRs), and the community delivered 65 of them, with 46 merged as of Nov. 26. You can check out the status of MRs at Hackathon Community MRs. This is almost the triple the number of MRs from the September Hackathon, as we easily surpassed the September total by the end of Day 1. Beyond the number of MRs, what was also impressive was community's participation across a wide variety of GitLab projects. In addition to GitLab Community and Enterprise editions, we saw MRs for GitLab Development Kit (GDK), GitLab Shell, Gitter, the GitLab website, and more.
What else happened during the event?
In addition to hacking, we had several community experts deliver tutorial sessions on topics ranging from Meltano, Omnibus, GitLab Architecture, and Gitter. Recordings/slides from all the sessions can also be found on the Hackathon wiki page.
When is the next Hackathon?
We will be having another Hackathon in mid-Q1'2019, and will announce the dates in January. Please stay tuned for further announcements in another blog post and discussions on the GitLab Community room in Gitter and on the GitLab forum. More importantly, if you have any suggestions for topics and/or feedback on last month's event, please mention them on the GitLab Community room in Gitter to help us improve future Hackathons.
Hackathon prizes
As we announced at the Hackathon kickoff, everyone who had MRs merged will receive a token of our appreciation for their contribution. During the Hackathon period, 19 people had MRs merged and the "grand prize" winner with most MRs merged is once again George Tsiolis, with 13 merged MRs! Congratulations to everyone! I will reach out to all winners shortly.
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
