Hey there, I’m a member of the GitLab Community Relations team. My team is responsible for this page. I shared the page today at a DevRel meetup where OP was presenting on Hacker News. I’m grateful he chose to share it with all of you. Thanks, Dan.
If there are ways we can improve how we engage with the HN community, myself and our team would love your feedback.
Hi, I think either I missed something or I see an insight that may not be in there yet, not sure if. In brief:
“Conveying without convincing.”
I think this guide is generally applicable to everyone interacting on HN, not just GitLab PRops, and while considering that I uncovered something I think would improve the value the guidelines.
Lots of online conversations get mired in back-and-forth persuasion, where each side is trying to convince the other of their viewpoint rather than just trying to convey it. This is essentially an impossible conversation to walk away from satisfied, because it’s rare that anyone can be convinced.
So, instead, focus on conveying. Ensure the facts are made clear and point out disagreements. Share your motivations and reasoning. Ask people to clarify when they say something you don’t understand, or could parse multiple ways. Leave disagreement alone, and don’t press it to change into agreement.
This is the toughest thing for anyone to do in conversation (“someone is wrong in the internet” xkcd here), but it’s absolutely the most essential skill and I don’t see it clearly called out. (Maybe I missed it though, it’s late!)
So, I would love to see that concept applied in guideline form. Teaching people to ensure comprehension rather than convincing, and to move on if it isn’t getting through, is the ultimate win in online chat, and I encourage adding it the the guide.
One thing that looked a little odd is the doc asks potential contributors to familiarize themselves with a fairly convoluted guide to 'unofficial' HN features but doesn't mention or link HN's own guidelines and FAQ. But maybe it's targeted at people who've read them?
Is it Gitlabs goal to overthrow GitHub as the most popular code repository tool? Or are you catering to a specific/specialized section of the market?
I haven’t used Gitlab, but since this is HN I’ll throw an advice your way anyway: I would LOVE to see a really good code review tool. GitHub has made improvements, but I love reviewable and want at least one of GitHub/Gitlab to have a really amazing code review experience. Things like being able to organize discussions, encouraging better code review etiquette (somehow)… just make it possible for developers to review code.
Devrel and evangelist is that a full time job or is it something a developer gets time off to do?
I think we’re I’m going is, when we see “Hi it’s Jon/Jane from gitlab …” is it a developer taking time out of their day to respond or is it a full time marketing person?
Yep they're full-time marketing people, not random devs taking time out of their day to respond.
Very rarely do devs at these companies feel comfortable enough to respond directly, I think, that's natural because most people aren't comfortable representing the company they work for. Usually when you see that happen, it's some coordinate effort internally to get a dev from some team to respond.
> I think we’re I’m going is, when we see “Hi it’s Jon/Jane from gitlab …” is it a developer taking time out of their day to respond or is it a full time marketing person?
When you see someone writing "Hi, Michael from GitLab here" it is not always a Developer Evangelist or a Community Relations team member. Everyone at GitLab can join the conversation here on Hacker News :)
> Devrel and evangelist is that a full time job or is it something a developer gets time off to do?
Developer Evangelists at GitLab have an engineering background, everyone has their own experience and preferences though. For example, I feel much more confident in C/C++, Go and Python, and want to learn Ruby on Rails, and Rust.
Potentially there's room to go more into detail in the team members overview: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati... - all team member profiles are linked, where more social profiles are available. I'm using 'dnsmichi' nearly everywhere, keeping things simple.
Speaking for myself:
I was a maintainer of an OSS monitoring tool from 2009-2020, and love diving into backend engineering and Ops topics. At some point, I was doing development, community building, support, social media and marketing. And a bit of Developer Relations with speaking at events. This did not work out so well in 2019 in my previous job doing all of that, where other companies have different teams and multiple people for.
Then I saw the Developer Evangelist role at GitLab later in November 2019 in a tweet from Sid (https://poly.work/h/11Rk7Jqw), and toyed with a full time job, switching gears from full-time development to full-time developer relations / advocacy / evangelism. Friends had gone on their adventure too, Philipp Krenn from Elastic has been a great role model.
I made ambitious plans and took many notes in https://gitlab.com/dnsmichi/tech-evangelism preparing for my role, and got an offer to join GitLab in March 2020. It's been an exciting, wild ride in the past ~2 years. Not everything went well - I learned a lot from a comparison blog post discussed here on HN, and keep reflecting on how we can create better helpful content for everyone to benefit. Details in https://www.polywork.com/dnsmichi/highlights/a6f10cbf-515d-4...
I'm doing many things, sometimes too many, requiring me to refine scope and focus on the important topics. For example, 2022 will be a strong theme for Observability and OpenTelemetry, app instrumentation for developers and CI/CD Observability. I've started activities with launching a new community learning website on https://o11y.love/ and feature implementation ideas for CI/CD Observability in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/338943
A general problem in Developer Relations can be the feeling of not being successful, sometimes also called "imposter syndrome". I never thought that it could reach me, though I am reflecting on how to avoid these situations and keep writing my own "diary" / "log" in a timeline what I do. There are often small highlights which can make your day :) I have shared thoughts about it in a blog post which also dives more into Developer Relations activities: https://dnsmichi.at/2022/01/20/how-polywork-helps-devrel/
Hope this insight into my story and motivation helps :)
I think it's only you and Mr. Prince left from the IPO'd devtools crew, you're the only two I see still kicking around occasionally. But hey, big job so thanks for stopping by. Enjoy your dinner.
Oh yeah, I forgot about Mitch, although I don't see him around that much, sytse and eastdakota I see quite frequently. Also apparently Jeff Lawson is still active(ish)! https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jeffiel
Will be interesting to see if, once stripe goes public Patrick sticks around.
A bit off topic, but if I would like to introduce such a handbook on my team as well, what technology does it use? It looks and feels so much fresher, clean and responsive than a simple wiki. I see it is markdown files with some CSS, but what engine do you use to build and render the handbook.
Is there a repo that holds the template to set up such a handbook?
Cheers and congrats. Always admired how you kept all your employees engaged with the handbook to not have it deteriorate, but thrive.
TL;DR: It is a JAMStack-style static site, which we publish with the Middleman static site editor.
However, there's a lot more to it than that, and it's always actively evolving.
There's not currently a page which summarizes the architecture, but there are multiple pages and docs which are focused on processes around editing and maintaining the site. Here is a link which is a good starting point to see what's under the covers and how we use it: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/git-page-update/#11-start-...
Hey John, I'm interested in DevRel and Evangelism on your team. I've read some of your documentation and enjoyed what I've read. I'm a dev of 5 years and I'd like to apply to your team. Could you give me some pointers and tips about the interviews? Thanks!
Given we are so transparent, it seems that most folks who conduct interviews at GitLab expect candidates to have done a fair bit of research in advance of the interviews. So if you're looking to join the Developer Evangelism team, brushing up on our handbook and familiarizing yourself with what we do would be a good idea. That will allow you to come to the interview prepared to frame your experience and abilities through the lens of how we work and the results we aim to deliver to GitLab and our community.
Sharing my personal experience, not speaking for GitLab here:
One thing I did when I was excited about the Developer Evangelist role: I started writing a document in the open, collecting thoughts what I learned, what I want to do, and which ideas could help this drive forward. Markdown, Web IDE, Git commits. Don't check the commit times, they might be at 3am in the morning from an iPad :-)
It was too ambitious, and strategies changed. Still, it allowed me create a single source of truth and define a path forward, preparing for coffee chats and later interviews. I like to come back occasionally for ideas on new content :)
If there are ways we can improve how we engage with the HN community, myself and our team would love your feedback.