marketing VS support

GitLab team member here. Thanks for flagging.

Our web team is working to resolve this issue here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/digital-experience/b...

> Having a web-based IDE is great for newcomers and will work on cheap Chromebooks or iPads

Good call, thanks. GitLab team member here.

From my experience as GitLab trainer in my past job, a web frontend to edit files hides the complexity of Git on the CLI, and helps with the "5 min success" to get going and learning. This can help with team member onboarding, as well as OSS projects looking for contributors.

Combined with CI/CD pipeline feedback in the same interface, without context switches, it makes the learning story easier to follow too.

The first workshops to get started with GitLab CI/CD from 2 years ago, are linked in the documentation, and use the Web IDE. [0] Seen great learning curves from the wider community :-) Taking a note to create a new workshop with the new IDE in the future. [1]

[0] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/quick_start/

[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/corporate_marketing/...

Thank you for the great thoughts :)

> And maybe only cache the downloads on the main branch.

$CI_COMMIT_REF_SLUG resolves into the branch when executed in a pipeline. Using it as value for the cache key, Git branches (and related MRs) use different caches. It can be one way to avoid collision but requires more storage with multiple caches. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/variables/predefined_variables...

In general, I agree, the more caches and parallel execution you add, the more complex and error prone it can get. Simulating a pipeline with runtime requirements like network & caches needs its own "staging" env for developing pipelines. That's a scenario not many have, or might be willing to assign resources onto. Static simulation where you predict the building blocks from the yaml config, is something GitLab's pipeline authoring team is working on in https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/6498

And it is also a matter of insights and observability - the critical path in the pipeline has a long max duration, where do you start analysing and how do you prevent this scenario from happening again. Monitoring with the GitLb CI Pipeline Exporter for Prometheus is great, another way of looking into CI/CD pipelines can be tracing.

CI/CD Tracing with OpenTelemetry is discussed in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/338943 to learn about user experiences, and define the next steps. Imho a very hot topic, seeing more awareness for metrics and traces from everyone. Like, seeing the full trace for pipeline from start to end with different spans inside, and learning that the container image pull takes a long time. That can be the entry point into deeper analysis.

Another idea is to make app instrumentation easier for developers, providing tips for e.g. adding /metrics as an http endpoint using Prometheus and OpenTelemetry client libraries. That way you not only see the CI/CD infrastructure & pipelines, but also user side application performance monitoring and beyond in distributed environments. I'm collecting ideas for blog posts in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/corporate_marketing/...

For someone starting with pipeline efficiency tasks, I'd recommend setting a goal - like shown in the blog post X minutes down to Y - and then start with analysing to get an idea about the blocking parts. Evaluate and test solutions for each part, e.g. a terraform apply might depend on AWS APIs, whereas a Docker pull could be switched to use the Dependency proxy in GitLab for caching.

Each environment has different requirements - collect helpful resources from howtos, blog posts, docs, HN threads, etc. and also ask the community about their experience. https://forum.gitlab.com/ is a good spot too. Recommend to create an example project highlighting the pipeline, and allowing everyone to fork, analyse, add suggestions.

Good morning HN. I am the DRI (directly responsible individual) for about.gitlab.com and I have created this issue to audit our trackers, cookies, and other data collection on the marketing website https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/inbound-marketing/ma...

Our product does not include the tracking that is used on the marketing site.

Hi,

> This was not a poor accident by a single employee. It's noble that the author tries to take all the blame on himself, but honestly, I feel like that is a moment where a leader has to step in and accept their mistake and not let a small trooper eat all the bullets.

The issues you have found are all assigned to me, or I created them. My task is to create blog posts, some of which being a hackathon and challenge. The KPI are impressions, other metrics are hard to measure. As a Developer Evangelist, I often need to learn new technologies, or dive into unknown areas connecting the dots.

You can learn more about our focus areas in our handbook: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati...

I'm focussing on the Ops side, with a backend development background in the past 15 years. I was once a maintainer of an OSS monitoring project called Icinga, a Nagios fork back then. I decided to take on a new journey with becoming a Developer Evangelist in March 2020 (you can learn more on my website https://dnsmichi.at/about/ in case you're interested).

That being said, I've found it interesting to learn about web apps and their deployment, and dive into new things. Never having found a use case for trying Heroku, March brought up one: There was a Twitter theme of "Everyone is building a better Heroku" - https://twitter.com/adamhjk/status/1369704730218299392?s=27

From there, I thought of learning Heroku while comparing it with the 5 minute production app. I underestimated the challenge of creating a web app with a persistent backend, and decided to stick with the simple battleships demo I had initially found.

This state of the blog post felt good enough for me, and I did not include the persistent backend just yet, but moved it into a separate blog post. This is feedback I got during the review.

Turns out that this decision was wrong, next to other negative raw sentiments I had added in the blog post.

You can try to convince that it is not my fault, and I will convince you - it is, and I am standing up for it. Public and transparent.

I know we all get better from making mistakes. The lesson I learned today helped me improve a talk I gave at a meetup in my evening, it added technical insights as well as helped with the story line. That's the tracking issue: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/corporate_marketing/...

We will continue to iterate, and have a retrospective on what we can improve from the lessons learned today. Thanks for your feedback.

Not OP but strace gives you a ton of info even if you filter by syscalls with -e. You really need something like https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support/toolbox/strace-parser to get information like what this seems to provide out of it.

Hi @atonse - I'm a Senior Manager at GitLab Support. I appreciate you taking the time to put together your feedback. I'm happy to discuss the particularities of your support experience if you send me an email at lkozloff[at]gitlab.com

There's a couple of general points though that I'd love to comment on.

> Why can't I just SSO using my GitLab credentials into Zendesk?

I'd love to have this as well - it makes complete sense (especially for our SaaS customers - it wouldn't help as much for self-managed). In order to get it implemented we need GitLab.com to become a SAML or JSON Web Token source. We have an open feature request for that here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/238419

Even with that implemented we'd still have some challenges identifying who should be getting support without occasionally asking for proof of a support contract. As you said, you're part of multiple GitLab groups. It's well possible that some of those are on our Free tier and others on Paid tiers. In some contexts you'd be eligible for Support, and in others you might not be.

Usually this speed bump only hits the first time you contact support. Once you've opened a ticket we'll have you linked up correctly.

Recently I've been working on improving contact management and making sure customers are aware of what they can do to make their first support ticket the best experience it can be. You can track that effort in https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-com/support/-/epics/156

> Why use terms like "Support Entitlement" – just say, which org/group are you with?

We have to consider both our self-managed customers and SaaS customers with our language. For GitLab.com customers naming a path completely works (and is one of the ways you can prove your entitlement: https://about.gitlab.com/support/managing-support-contacts.h...). For Self-managed we have to map account names exactly and need a bit more as some organizations have visibility of tickets between users, in which there may be sensitive data.

I think you're right that it could sound more human. I've opened up https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support/support-team-meta/-/is... to discuss improvements.

If you have any thoughts, feel free to participate!

Full disclosure, I have some rather strong feelings about telemetry on gitlab and the implementation process itself.

-----------------------

I originally posted a different issue labeled "Pseudonymization MVC Rollout Plan"[1] but that issue went private rather quickly after appearing here. Sadly it wasn't archived.

To keep this issue from just going private, it (and some other relevant issues) have been archived: http://web.archive.org/web/20211012193943/https://gitlab.com...

There is atleast one more telemetry related issue that[2] has had their access limited after being mentioned in the feedback thread.

Also, I'd recommend checking out:

* the last telemetry attempt from 2019: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/issues/5672

* feedback from last time: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support/support-team-meta/-/is... & https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/2280

* self-hosted instance telemetry(operational data section) that is already live and has a pretty severe dark pattern for opting out: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/07/20/improved-billing-an...

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28840685

Training used for support personnel: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support/support-training/-/tree/master/.gitlab/issue_templates