A lot of tools we use are described in the rest of the handbook (GitLab, Google Docs, 1Password, etc.). This section is for tools that don't fit anywhere else.
Use this general GitLab branded slide template when creating slide decks for internal and external use. Make a copy of the slide deck and only edit the copy; please do not edit the template itself.
Here are a few quick steps for updating your slide decks to match the most recent template:
Theme which will open the Themes panel (on the right-hand side). 
Import theme.GitLab deck template into the search field.GitLab-Deck-Template and click the Select button in the bottom left to apply the theme to your slide deck.Use these Gitlab branded form templates when creating internal or external surveys or forms. Make a copy of the form and only edit the copy; do not edit the template itself.
Calendly connects to your Google calendar so people can book a time with you without having a Google Account.
Set up the 45 minute time slot with the following event description text (replacing XXXXX with your @gitlab.com handle):
This will be a Zoom Meeting at https://gitlab.zoom.us/XXXXX
Question? Please email me. GitLab Primer: /primer/
Display Text, use this line: Schedule a meeting with me! so GitLabbers can schedule a 1:1 call with you in GitLab, by simply clicking your Calendly link in your Slack profile.Keep in mind that unlike normal Google Calendar events, Calendly events are not automatically synchronized between both parties when changes are made. If an event needs to be cancelled or modified, make sure to use Calendly to do so.
Slack now supports "Do Not Disturb Hours" so you won't be pinged in the middle of the night or while you are dealing with family matters. You can set your "Do Not Disturb Hours" by clicking on the bell at the top of the left pane in the Slack app. You also have the option of snoozing for 20 minutes or up to 24 hours. Note: Do Not Disturb can be overridden in the event of an emergency. See Slack documentation for more information.
You can browse all available GitLab channels by clicking on "Channels" on the left pane in the Slack app. From there, you can see every channel, who created it, and how many members there are. Every team member is automatically added to #general, where announcements are made and information for the entire company is shared. There are also a few default channels that every new hire is added to, such as: #celebrations, #new_labbers, #questions, #random, & #thanks; these channels are optional, but we think they are a great place for team members to interact and get to know each other.
In addition to GitLab team members, designated groups such as the Core Team members and advisors outside of GitLab may be granted access to our Slack channels. However, internal channels that start with #a_ will be restricted to GitLab team members who have been invited to those channels only. Any confidential conversations regarding our customers should be restricted only to #a_ channels. The rationale for internal channels is that it could be a breach of many of our contracts for third parties to have knowledge of GitLab customers. This is especially the case when third parties could be customers' competitors.
Slack has the functionality to set an individual status. For example, you can select away from keyboard or working remotely. If you are out of the office for holiday/vacation you can update using PTO Ninja. This is a great way to let your team know if you are available or not.
There are multiple ways to invite people into a Slack channel. The easiest way is to use the invite command by typing /invite @jenny. Avoid inviting people through a mention message. E.g. @jenny as it can create a message that distracts others.
Quick Switcher is a great feature to know about if you want to get productive with Slack. As the name suggests, it allows you to switch between channels and direct messages quickly. Invoke it with Cmd + k on Mac or Ctrl + k on Windows or Linux and start typing the name of the person to chat with or the channel you are interested in. You can then navigate the suggestions with ↑ and ↓ keys and hit enter to select.
With lots of channels and direct messages, Slack can become overwhelming. To help keep track of activity on Slack, and to simplify the interface, consider hiding conversations with no unread activity.
Slack has a built-in feature to Unfurl links included in messages posted to Slack. This will post a preview of the link alongside the message. You can remove the unfurled preview of the link by hitting the "x" in the top-left of the preview. This will then prompt you to confirm removing the attachment, which you can hit "Yes, remove".
In the confirmation prompt you may also see a checkbox to "Disable future attachments from this website". As a workspace admin if you select the disable option this will blacklist the link/domain across the workspace and will impact every user. If you do happen to blacklist a link or a domain, they can be modified in the Workspace admin portal under Settings & Permissions.
If you are in a group direct message with multiple people, you can change it to a private channel, in order to avoid extra pings and allow additional team members to be added or removed to the channel.
The interface colors can be customized in Slack. This is especially useful when using multiple slack accounts, setting up different themes makes it really easy to differentiate them instantly. The theme selector is available under Preferences > Sidebar > Theme.
In order to setup a Gitlab theme, send yourself the following message: #643685,#634489,#FC6D26,#ffffff,#71558f,#ffffff,#FCA326,#e24329, and press the Switch sidebar theme button.
To set up a Zoom meeting, sign up for a free basic account using your GitLab email address, and share the link for your "personal meeting room" with your participants. Note that on the Basic license, meetings are capped at 100 people, and meeting durations are capped at 40 minutes. If you need to be able to organize calls longer than 40 minutes using Zoom, contact #peopleops to be granted a Pro account. By default, only Support Engineers and members of the Sales team are given Pro accounts during onboarding since their job routinely involves making video calls with (potential) customers.
To record the meeting set up cloud recording. You can also configure Zoom to save to the cloud automatically. Go to "My Meeting Settings" and find the "Recording" section, then click on "Cloud Recording". Setting the topic of the meeting is important, otherwise all meetings will be recorded with a generic name. Once recording is complete, your videos will not appear in the “Recordings” section of your Zoom account. Your recordings will automatically be saved to a folder on Google Drive under "GitLab Videos".
Our Zoom account has End-to-End Encryption enabled. This may impact performance, so if you run into any issues, let People Ops know.
If there is a meeting active, a new meeting cannot start until the host ends the meeting or all participants leave. People Ops can force end a meeting by logging into Zoom with the credentials in 1Password, going to My Meetings, finding the meeting they would like to end, then selecting "End." This will allow the next meeting to begin.
At some point, you may need to give a slide presentation using Zoom. Ideally, you should be able to see your speaker notes while participants see your slide show. This is fairly easy to do with two monitors by using presenter view and sharing the monitor which contains the slides. If you have only one monitor, it is still possible using the following steps:
Presenter view. This will make your presentation take up the entire screen.Toggle Full Screen option, third button from the right, next to settings. This will end full screen mode without leaving the presenter view.Presenter View from the menu.Share Screen from the options at the bottom of the screen.If you would like to practice presenting, you can do so using your own private Zoom room.
Start with video.Record.While Zoom works on Linux, the application is not free software. As a result, some might be wary of running this directly on their computer. One way of running Zoom without worrying about what it does is to use firejail.
To use Zoom with Firejail, first install Zoom or download the archive. Zoom offers standalone binaries that you can download should your distribution not have a package for Zoom. Once installed, install firejail.
Once both firejail and Zoom are installed we need two things:
You can use the following firejail profile and store it in ~/.config/firejail/zoom.profile:
noblacklist ~/.config/zoomus.conf
include /etc/firejail/zoom.local
include /etc/firejail/disable-common.inc
include /etc/firejail/disable-programs.inc
include /etc/firejail/disable-devel.inc
whitelist ~/.zoom
caps.drop all
netfilter
nonewprivs
noroot
protocol unix,inet,inet6,netlink
seccomp
private-tmp
Next we need a home directory for Zoom. For this example we'll use /opt/zoom/home:
sudo mkdir -p /opt/zoom/home
sudo chown -R $USER /opt/zoom
With this in place we can start Zoom using firejail as follows:
firejail --quiet --profile=~/.config/firejail/zoom.profile --private=/opt/zoom/home /path/to/zoom/ZoomLauncher
Note that you must start the ZoomLauncher binary and not the shell script wrapper called zoom.
Especially when talking with customers, it's good to make a good impression! One way is to use a phone to dial in, which can increase reliability of your audio connection and reduce latency. In general, a landline has the lowest latency, a mobile phone is next, and internet audio is variable. Here are some tips for quick and effecive telephone connections to Zoom meetings.
#, followed by your Participant ID, followed by # again. Zoom will merge the two connections without annoying others on the call.Krisp will mute background noise when you're in a noisy environment so you can hear and be heard more easily on calls.
$4.99 tool for OS X that lets you set a hotkey (e.g. fn) to mute your microphone ("push-to-talk" or "push-to-mute"). Never again will you have to switch your window focus to Google Hangouts or Zoom to speak or mute. The icon will show the current state of your mic input (x means muted). With a right click (or your configured hotkey) you can switch from push to talk to push to mute. Don't forget to unblock your mic in Zoom/Google Hangouts immediately after joining. Be warned that page up with fn+down arrow will activate it. Use space for page down instead of fn+up arrow. Warning: Check your headset compatility before purchase. Many usb headsets are unmutable.
If you use Linux (e.g. Arch, Ubuntu or Fedora) you can create a system-wide keyboard shortcut to mute/unmute your mic. Please note that it only works for Linux distributions which use ALSA for sounds (most popular Linux distributions use ALSA). All you need to do is go to your desktop environment's Keyboard Settings and create a custom shortcut with the command amixer set Capture toggle and assign a key combination of your choice (e.g. Pause Break key). Once this is done, you can mute/unmute your mic using the assigned keyboard shortcut while you're in any application. Refer to this original answer on Askubuntu to learn more.
During a presentation or screen share, you might want to disable your notifications on OS X to prevent distractions or possible embarrassment.
The Notification Center can be quickly disabled by Option-Clicking the menu bar icon in the top right of your screen. This disables notifications until the next day. Option-Click again to re-enable immediately. Alternatively, click on the Notification Center icon, then scroll up to reveal the "Do Not Disturb" toggle.
If your laptop is a MacBook with a Touch Bar, note that you can assign a handy "Do Not Disturb" button on your Control Strip. In System Preferences, navigate to Keyboard settings and click "Customize Control Strip…" to add this.
Here are some useful tips if you are new to Mac. Even if you are not new, these keyboard shortcuts may come in handy.
If you are switching from Windows to Mac, these tips may be useful.
See the Engineering handbook for a listing of cloud resources and how to gain access to them.
We recommend you set your Google calendar access permissions to 'Make available for GitLab - See all event details'. Consider marking the following appointments as 'Private':
There are several benefits and reasons to sharing your calendar with everyone at GitLab:
Please click 'Guests can modify event' so people can update the time in the calendar instead of having to reach out via other channels. You can configure this to be checked by default under Event Settings.)
Add a filter to remove invites responses from your inbox with the following query:
*.ics subject:("invitation" OR "accepted" OR "rejected" OR "updated" OR "canceled event" OR "declined") when where calendar who organizer
The GitLab Availability Calendar has been deprecated to allow for GitLab to scale effectively. We have new created tools and tips for managing your time off
The GitLab Team Meetings Calendar is available to all team members and can be found in your calendars list. You can find the details for the Company Calls, Group Conversations, 101s, and other teams' meetings here, so you can attend a different team's meeting and ask questions, learn about what they're working on, and get to know the rest of the GitLab functional groups. These meetings are open to everyone in GitLab. If you are creating a new team meeting, please copy it to the GitLab Team Meetings calendar, and reach out to People Ops with any questions.
To copy an event to this calendar:
@group.calendar.google.com style Calendar ID under "Integrate calendar".(This assumes you are using Google's new Calendar).
When you have accidentally deleted something from the Team Meetings calendar, you can recover it by:
It might be useful to add a Gmail filter that adds a label to any GitLab notification email in which you are specifically mentioned, as opposed to a notification that you received simply because you were subscribed to the issue or merge request.
@your_gitlab_username.GitLab issues and merge requests can generate a lot of email notifications depending on your settings and how in-demand your attention is. It can be useful to apply a label to these generated emails and move them out of your immediate inbox.
from:gitlab@mg.gitlab.com.If you use the archive function you normally return to your overview. With auto-advance you can return to the next message. Enable "Auto-advance" in the labs section under settings. The default setting of showing the next older message is OK.
Set up an email signature which includes your full name and job title so people can quickly know what you do.
Note: You can copy and paste the template below to use it in your own signature.
John Doe Frontend Engineer | GitLab
Keyboard shortcuts only work if you've turned them on in Gmail Settings.
Steps below:
Here are some shortcuts you can use
We would be remiss if we didn't start this section off with this IMPORTANT message: Your default storage place for information that needs to persist and be available to others in the company should be ON THE WEBSITE/IN THE COMPANY HANDBOOK and not in Google Drive and Google Apps files!! This is from the top. This is how we operate, because Google Docs/Apps can only be found and contributed to by team members, and not by users, customers, advocates, future employees, Google handbook searches, or developers.
Having said that, there is content which doesn’t make sense to be created on the website directly (eg. large collections of data in tables, spreadsheets for calculations, etc) or for which Google Drive storage makes sense. For these, when creating or storing files in Google Drive, the web/handbook should have a link to this content and effectively be the index for finding things of relevance that are stored in the Google drive.
There are a few ways to do this to maintain proper levels of privacy:
Rarely, but sometimes, it is appropriate to store files in Google Drive but NOT let those outside GitLab see it. In general, this is when there is information which we need to keep, but which we are under obligation to not share. Examples of this are:
Everything else should be viewable by the public, although not necessarily editable by them. Examples of this content are:
Following are some tips for how to use Google Drive for the instances where it makes sense to.
It is important that we not just throw files into random or general places in the shared Google Drives. Doing so makes it harder for others to find and work with the content. Here are some guidelines to organizing the Google Drive content:
For starters, when your GitLab Google company account is created you automatically get a Google Drive 30GB storage allocation in your own "home" directory (called My Drive). You can get to it by:
This is great for storing your own working files. As already stated, this should never be the final resting place for shared files that are meant to be used by the rest of the company (or beyond).
There are a few Google Drive repositories of GitLab shared files (there might be more, please add if not listed here):
How do you use these? You don't have to remember these URL's. To add these links to your Google Drive My Drive directory, do the following:
To really make your Google Drive easier to access, you can have your Google Drive show up on your Mac Finder as a regular drive. With this it is easier to store and view files such as videos, analyst reports (PDFs), etc.
Here's how to do this:
Computers with older CPUs (pre-2016/Skylake) may be missing hardware acceleration for VP9. In Chrome, this can cause excessive CPU due to use of the codec. On MacOS switching to Safari or using h264ify (Chrome Web Store) solves this since it will use h264 that is hardware accelerated.
To check the status of acceleration on Chrome, see the "Video Encode" option in about://gpu.
Hangouts on Air probably only works with a maximum of 15 people for scheduled calls (same limit as normal Google Hangouts).
Potential problem 1: even when I logged in as GitLab and got the bar below the call, I could not switch it to on-air! I did notice that the time was not properly set (anymore?). I did a test event before and that seemed to work OK. I'll try one more time to see if it works.
Potential problem 2: the video showed up as listed by default
Go to My live events on YouTube and switch to the GitLab account on the top right (you need to be a manager of our YouTube channel).
Go to => life streaming => events and create a new one with the attributes:
The view on watch page URL only allows for people to watch it. Window that pops up when you press the start hangout on air button has the proper URL that you can send to other people and/or add it to the calendar invite, it is structured like: https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/ytl/LONGHASH. When people join the event they have to accept a warning.
Completed live events will show the video and you can click the image to view it. You can use actions to make it public here.
BTW Trying to set this up via Google+ via Hangouts on Air instead of via YouTube doesn't seem to connect to the right YouTube channel, even if you selected the right account on the top right.
Grammarly is a good tool for those who want to feel more comfortable drafting written communication in English (American or British). There is a free and premium version.
Warning: Grammarly has a contextual spelling and grammar check. Grammarly will have access to everything you type, they have had a security problem.
Link your GitLab email address to an easily recognizable photo of yourself on Gravatar. It is company policy to use a photo, and not an avatar, a stock photo, or something with sunglasses for any of your GitLab accounts, as we have a lot of GitLabbers and our brains are comfortable with recognizing people; let's use them.
Appear.in allows you to instantly create a free video chat room for up to 8 participants with no login and no installation. It also offers a free reliable mobile video conference app.
One Tab (Free) tames tabs into a list which can be sorted and exported.
Quitter (Free) will switch off apps for you after some period of inactivity. Consider using this to hide Slack after a while to reduce your urge to check new messages all the time.
TripMode ($7.99) lets you control which apps can use the internet. Especially useful when you're working on a cellular/metered connection.
ShareX (Free / Windows only) is the ultimate screen capture toolbox for Windows, which includes many different options to record your screen and automate your workflow with automatic uploading, resizing and much more.
Teampaper Snap (Free / Mac only) is the ultimate screen capture tool for Mac to voice your thoughts on anything you can see on a screen.
Clocker (Free / macOS Only) adds a clean and distraction free world clock to your menu bar so you can check on your fellow teammates across different timezones.
Status Clock is a free, easy tool to place a second clock into the macOS Menu Bar, e.g. for showing the UTC time. Perfect for anyone doing sysadmin work or tasks that require referencing UTC (or any secondary timezone).
Bear (Free) is a clean writing tool for notes and long-form writing. Ulysses $5/month is also a great choice.
Loom (Free) is a handy Chrome plugin tool for video walkthroughs. Nice tool for demo recordings and internal/external documentation.
WorkFrom is a crowd-sourced resource of coffee shops and other such places that are remote-work friendly.
Google Analytics (GA) is an essential tool for making data-driven decisions. It receives data from both about.gitlab.com and docs.gitlab.com websites. Read through the Online Marketing Handbook for more information on GA.
For example, you can look at the GA data to analyze how visited is a certain page, in a period of your choice. You can also look at the GA referrals data to understand where the users are coming from and where they go when they leave a certain page.
To see the data for a specific page:
On the middle of the page, look for a search bar and paste the URL you'd like to analyze (without https://) and click on the magnifier button to search:
Note that you can use the search tool with:
/2017/, which will return the results for all the blog posts published on 2017docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ will return the results for all the range of pages contained in the /ci/ directoryGA will output the data about the page (or range of pages) you searched for, including pageviews, unique pageviews, and other data:
To find the referrals for a certain page, continue from the steps above.
Click on one of the website links to look at the data for a page of your choice
GA will output the referrals, including Previous Page Path and Next Page Path:
When the GitLab Development Kit cannot start using the ./run command and Unicorn terminates because port 3000 is already in use, you will have to check what process is using it. Running sudo lsof -i -n -P | grep TCP | grep 3000 will yield the offender so this process can be killed. It might be wise to alias this command in your .bash_profile or equivalent for your shell.
Use command aliases in your shell to speed up your workflow. Take a look at these aliases and others in Sid's dotfiles project. For example, by adding the following to your .bash_profile or equivalent for your shell, you can just type s to checkout the master branch of this website, pull the latest changes, and open the repository in Sublime Text:
alias gco='git checkout'
alias gl='git pull --prune'
alias gca='git commit -a'
alias gp='git push origin HEAD'
alias www='cd ~/Dropbox/Repos/www-gitlab-com/source'
alias s='www;subl .;gco master;gl'
After editing, you can just type gca to commit all of your changes, followed by gp to push them to the remote branch.
By adding the below mentioned lines in your .bash_profile or any equivalent for your shell, you will be able to view the git branch that you are using currently. If you are not inside a git repository, it only displays the username and the current directory.
git_branch() {
git branch 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/(\1)/'
}
export PS1="\u@\[\033[32m\]\w\[\033[33m\]\$(git_branch)\[\033[00m\]\$ "
Doing the following, makes the changes to get reflected in you current terminal:
source ~/.bashrc
Putting the following in Preferences.sublime-settings - User will among other things ensure that if you open the www-gitlab-com website you're not opening the output files by accident:
{
"font_size": 18,
"spell_check": true,
"translate_tabs_to_spaces": true,
"trim_trailing_white_space_on_save": true,
"folder_exclude_patterns": ["public"]
}
Simplenote is a free, open source note taking app which is cross platform, and syncs across all devices.
Spectacle is a free, open source windows resizing and arrangement tool for Macs and is amazing for productivity – particularly if you use multiple displays. Once you use this you'll never go back! Consider donating if you love it.
If you install MobileDay (Free) on your phone and give it access to your Google Calendar it can dial into conference calls for you. It is very good at detecting the number and password from the calendar invite.
Keeping You Awake (Free & Open Source) is a macOS utility application that can prevent your Mac from entering sleep mode for a predefined duration or as long as it is activated.
SessionBox is a browser extension that helps you deal with multiple sessions. It binds a particular session to a tab. This is particularly useful for testing with different users in the same browser.
Keychain Access applicationKeychain AccessPreferencesShow keychain status in menu barYou can lock your screen by clicking the lock icon on the menu bar and clicking Lock Screen
If you are working on multiple GitLab instances and want to have a visual differentiation, you can change the default Application theme to a different color.
old-mary and you want it to be just mary.STEP 1: Request your new username
https://gitlab.com/mary.support@gitlab.com, explaining the reasons why you need that username.STEP 2: Create a new account with your new username
mary@gitlab.com, add the new email as mary+something@gitlab.com: this is a Gmail trick! All your emails sent to this alias will end up in your GitLab email account. 😃mary+something@gitlab.com.STEP 3: Let's have some fun (kidding, this is critical!)
mary to something like mary-1 and DO NOT click update username yet. Rename your old username old-mary to your new username mary and DO NOT update that either. Just leave them typed into the boxes.mary to mary-1). Immediately, click update on the other one (old-mary to mary).mary-1 to your old one old-mary and click update username again.STEP 4: Move your projects (or not)
https:// url of your project there. To make things easier, make sure all the projects you want to import are set to public view. You can make them private afterwards.A record. Your groups won't be affected either, as they operate under their own namespace. Add both users as members of your groups and nothing changes.That's it! Don't forget to update your username on the team page and on the Marketing Handbook, in case you're a Marketing Team member.
We have a dedicated section for that in the handbook.
Note: you have to pay for these items yourself.
find source/handbook -type f | xargs wc -w
It was 901267 words on 2018-11-01, 2002 pages according to Wordcounter, and that is not counting the images.
If people want to use Webex instead of Zoom consider installing their native client under WebEx Productivity Tools. With the in-browser plugin the screen sharing sometimes doesn't work.
£19 tool for OS X is an application launcher on steroids. With the (paid) Powerpack, it's the best companion for developers, enabling automation and also a fantastic clipboard history. This feature is nicely integrated with many tools, and for example will forget passwords copied from 1password after they have been pasted. Using either the free or paid version you can also create custom web searches that will allow you to quickly search GitLab documentation and the handbook.
Simply create two custom web searches and input the URLs below as the search URL for each.
We have a central account for managing licenses of JetBrains' products like RubyMine or GoLand. If you want to use one of their products, please write a mail to jetbrains@gitlab.com and you will receive a link with which you can redeem your license. Make sure to use your company email address when creating your Jetbrains account. If at some point in the future you do not want to use the product anymore, please notify us via jetbrains@gitlab.com, so that we can assign the license to someone else.
If 2FA stops working unexpectedly (no new phone or computer) it's usually because of improperly configured date & time on either device. Make sure that "Automatic Date & Time" is enabled on both devices. If they're already enabled try toggling them off and on again to force an update. If this doesn't work, request that PeopleOps reset your 2FA setting.
Links for finding the settings:
For Android there's no definitive link, since most vendors have different UIs for their settings. But in the Settings-app, look for "Date & Time" and there should be a "Automatic Date & Time" toggle.
Brain.fm (free trial) provides music specially designed to help you focus, relax, meditate, recharge, sleep (great for plane rides). It's not just music though. They use scientifically validated brainwave manipulations to get results. It is AMAZING and really does work. Make sure to use with headphones, and give it 10-15 minutes for your brain to get used to it. ($6.95/$15.99/$47.40 per month/quarter/year)
Flash: Due to security flaws, we strongly recommend not using Adobe Flash. Certainly do not install it on your local machine. But even the Google Chrome plugin that let's you see embedded Flash content in websites can pose a security hazard. If you have not already, go to your Chrome Flash Settings and disable Flash. For further context, note that Google Chrome is removing Flash support soon, and while the plugin is better than a local install of Flash, it still leaves vulnerabilities for zero-day attacks.
For engineers interested in using Linux, please see our linux tools page.
@tipyn's home office equipment and macOS setup
@tnikic's home office setup and guide
Using this time management method is a great way to define time into "work" & "break" intervals that boost productivity. In brief; A 30 minute block of time is divided into a 25 minute work session, followed by a 5 minute break session. Repeat this twice an hour till the day is done & marvel at how much you've finished.
Link to Pomodoro Technique Wikipedia Page.
Link to download a Pomodoro Chrome Extension.
