For this month's contributor post, I'm excited to introduce Semyon Pupkov, who's been a consistent contributor to GitLab since 2016. The graph below shows Semyon's merge requests (MRs) since GitLab 8.13. Let's get to know him!
Can you tell us where you live and a little bit about your area?
I live in a city called Yekaterinburg in the Ural region of Russia. I love the nature here as it's not too hot in the summer and you will find good snow in the winter for snow boarding.
When did you first contribute to GitLab and why did you decide to contribute?
My first MR about two years ago was a pretty simple one as I removed unnecessary code from tests. I used GitLab Community Edition for my private projects and since I like open source software, I decided to look at the GitLab code base. When I found some areas for improvement mainly in tests, I decided to create my first MR.
Which areas of GitLab product have you been contributing to over the past two years?
Most of my contributions have been on the backend side where I tried to improve the existing code base.
Can you tell us what you do professionally?
I am a backend Ruby/Python developer and work at a company called SKB Kontur.
What do you enjoy doing when you're not working?
I have been a father for about six months, and I try to give as much of my free time to my daughter. I also like playing games on PlayStation 4 and my favorite game right now is FIFA 19. And of course, I like to contribute to open source projects.
What can we do better to help GitLab community contributors?
Sometimes in issues/MRs, I find links to Zendesk tickets or Slack discussions that are private, and this can be frustrating for someone not working at GitLab. Also, it would be great if GitLab had a better setup for local development with Docker and Docker Compose. I found the branch in the GitLab Development Kit repository with support for Docker Compose, but it probably needs some updating. I recently submitted an MR to help address this.
What advice do you have for others who may be interested in contributing to GitLab?
Just don't be afraid to get started. If you find places in the code that can be improved, you should make a contribution and in most cases your code will be welcomed and accepted.
Contributing to GitLab also allows you to work with a strong professional team. It's a good way to improve your skills while working on a great product.
Interested in learning how you can contribute?
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].
Note: This post is part of a series featuring people who contribute to GitLab.
