tech-evangelism VS gitlab

Adding my thoughts to resources shared in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30005358

> 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 :)

John shared this thread with all team members in Slack, and Chad Wooley joined to answer the question how the handbook is built in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30043995 Another example is Lyle Kozloff helping answer a support related question in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30015461

You will see the Developer Evangelism team engage more often, as it is defined in the responsibilities (https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati...). The team currently covers PT, ET, CET timezones. I am located in Germany, CET.

> 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 :)

Since the relevant code appears to be in the "ee" directory <https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/v16.11.0-ee/ee/l...> and is not present in the foss repo, I'm guessing the answer is no, at least for now. They do have a history of "releasing" features from EE back to CE but my suspicion is not for LLM stuff

(Side note: Issues are usually hash-prefixed like #1234 both on GitLab and GitHub. However, commit messages must not begin with a hash, they would be considered a comment and ignored. Therefore, GitHub has introduced the alternative prefix GH- and I've contributed a similar prefix GL- to GitLab a while ago.)

and its "oh, you want multi-arch, do you?" friend. While prosecuting this <https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/339567> I learned that https://hub.docker.com/layers/multiarch/qemu-user-static/7.2... actually mutates the binfmt_misc in buildx's context in order to exec the static copy of qemu in it https://github.com/multiarch/qemu-user-static/blob/v7.2.0-1/...

and, that the buildx plugin itself has some qemu magick in it, which got addressed in a minor version bump but I couldn't track down the relevant GitHub issue this second (I've flushed it from my mind, only recalling that there were a lot of actors in that tire fire)

This is actually a follow-up refactor, the fix is here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/commit/abe79e4ec43798...