Community Growth and Contribution Milestones

7/15/2025

This post details the technical implementation of a semi-automated onboarding solution for open source contributors to GitLab. It describes the use of issue templates with checklists, scheduled pipelines for initial issue creation, webhook events and custom payload templates for immediate pipeline triggering, Ruby scripts for syncing comment templates and automating follow-ups, GLQL for organizing issue tracking, and project mirroring to improve README discoverability. It also highlights the use of scoped labels for access request status and GitLab's value stream analytics for tracking response times.

6/5/2023

Introduced a new Achievements feature that allows organizations to award custom achievements to their GitLab users. This feature aims to increase engagement and productivity by recognizing user activity and contributions. Achievements can be created, awarded, and revoked by namespace maintainers or owners. The post highlights initial use cases for GitLab's Core Team and hackathon winners, and encourages organizations to implement achievements to reward desired behaviors.

9/13/2022

Introduced workflow labels (`workflow::ready for review`, `workflow::in dev`, `workflow::blocked`) to provide clearer states for merge requests, allowing community contributors to self-manage their MRs. Implemented automation via `@gitlab-bot ready` to set the state and assign reviewers. This has reduced the median time MRs spend in the 'ready for review' state from 17 days to 5 days and increased the median Open Community MR Age (OCMA) from 139 days to 78 days. Future work includes automating the transition of MRs back to `workflow::in dev` when further changes are needed.

7/21/2022

This post details GitLab's approach to software engineer onboarding, focusing on accelerating integration and reducing turnover. Key elements include a structured onboarding issue, the role of an onboarding buddy, emphasis on pairing, regular coffee chats for networking and feedback, tailoring the experience to individual roles, and aiming for engineers to ship production code within a week. The process is designed to create psychological safety, build relationships, and demonstrate company values.

12/16/2015

This post details the migration of feature proposals from Uservoice to GitLab issues, enabling direct community discussion and tracking. It also introduces the concept of assigning weights to 'Accepting merge requests' issues to facilitate contributions from new developers by identifying simpler tasks.