The GitLab community gathered on September 2-3 for the Q3 Hackathon and once again the GitLab Community set an impressive Hackathon record with 313 MRs submitted!
What did we accomplish?
This opening line almost needs to be a place holder for Hackathon recaps, but the GitLab community is setting new heights with each iteration. I love seeing the chart below that shows an impressive growth in wider community contributions especially over the past 4 Hackathons.
Once again, there were a lot of frontend/UX related epics that wider community members contributed to. A good example was for migration of Pajamas components and the Hackathon helped chip away at more than 1,000 issues related to this migration. One of the feedback from the previous Hackathon was to also have a plenty of backend-related issues for the Hackathon, and I want to thank many GitLab team members who helped populate the list of suggested Hackathon issues with backend items.
I believe we had the most number of office hour/tutorial sessions during this Hackathon and it's great to see 100+ views of many of these sessions within 24 hours of the recordings being posted on the Hackathon playlist. If you're interested in making a further dent in 1,000+ issues related to Pajamas components migration, you should watch the Pajamas tutorial session. You will see that it only takes 5-10 minutes to submit an MR for these issues.
Hackathon prizes
For this Hackathon, we have a laptop sleeve for everyone who had their MRs merged by September 15th and 30 people will be receiving the prize celebrating the 2nd anniversary of the Hackathon. As we did in the past several quarters, we have a prize for second place and want to recorgnize Gilang Gumilar, Kev, and Takuya Noguchi who all had more than 20 MRs merged. For the grand prize, I want to award two contributors Rajendra Kadam with 54 MRs Jonston Chan with 45 MRs merged! Thanks and congratulatations to everyone!
When is the next Hackathon?
The next Hackathon will take place on December 2-3, 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 Q4 Hackathon please feel free to suggest them on the GitLab Contributors Gitter.
Community challenge
You may have noticed when you scroll through the Hackathon page that we have a new prize under the Missed the last Hackathon? section. GitLab team members added the Community challenge label to a number issues that we want to encourage the wider community to work on. If you submit an MR for these issues and they get merged, you will receive a custom merchadise with the "Community challenge achieved" message. If you love coffee or tea, I think you will enjoy this cannister for your coffee beans or tea leaves.
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, UX design, and project templates. The project templates help developers get started with new languages and frameworks on GitLab. You can improve existing built-in project templates or start a new template to be distributed with GitLab.