Six months of planning culminated in 201 GitLab team-members taking over one Cancún resort for a long week of meetings, activities, hard work, and fun.
If it were appropriate to start a blog post with every emoji that expresses extreme delight, we would. In lieu of that we will just say the GitLab Summit in Mexico was beyond excellent. 🎉
A little background for the folks at home
As a fully remote company with people in 35 different countries, most of the team never gets to meet each other in person. To remedy that, and so that everyone gets a chance for some face-to-face time and to meet their teams, we do a team summit every nine months. This allows us to get to know the group better and have a unique opportunity to collaborate with our own teams and others we may not work with normally. By the end of the week we all have a better understanding of what everyone does, who we can go to with questions on specific topics, and how we all can work together as a team.
We took Cancún by storm
On Tuesday, January 10th, our entire team was welcomed by the people behind the screens with amazing swag, made specially for this trip, including a T-shirt, name badge, stickers, bag patches, and a drawstring bag; all Mexican themed.
Sid's shuffle challenge
After a full night's rest we kicked the week off with a welcome keynote by our main man, Sid, who immediately got the team spirit going by challenging the team to make the Idea to Production demo work on Google Kubernetes Engine.
If the team managed to show this fully functioning, he would do the Sid shuffle from "Ice Age 4". Needless to say our team didn't disappoint, and neither did Sid.
The video is not the best we've posted, but we don't want you to miss out on the Sid Shuffle. If you want to skip the live demo our team did, please go to 28:29.
So much awesomeness
We broke into smaller groups for a competitive scavenger hunt and enjoyed the fruits of our labor with a happy hour afterwards.
We could make this blog post five pages long just describing how beautiful our trip to Akumal beach was, where we got to snorkel with sea turtles, how impressive the Mayan ruins of Chichén Itzá were after so many years, the adrenaline rush the zipline gave us, or how much money we made at our very own GitLab Casino night, but there’s no way of putting into words how much fun this week was.
Getting together
As always, the highlight of the trip was just getting to meet everyone. The best thing about working at GitLab is the people. We have somehow managed to collect the most dedicated, thoughtful, and hardworking group of individuals around the world. Being in one place is exhausting, because there are so many wonderful people to meet, but it's also so inspiring. You get to hear about the diverse projects everyone is working on and their innovative solutions and you feel inspired by their passion and creativity. It made us so excited for 2017, knowing how much enthusiasm we are going to bring and the potential we have to continue to build an excellent company and product.
How about joining us at the next GitLab Summit? Check out our job openings and apply right now!
