GitLab

As of Friday, 2016-08-05, I will have worked for GitLab for a month. That is absolutely crazy to me how much time flies! Because GitLab is a completely remote company, it really takes some getting used to on workflow, communication, and really just overall lifestyle changes. I absolutely love it. It is an incredibly amazing benefit that I hope to see become more common. One of the issues I feel that I’ve faced is Imposter Syndrome. This is something that many people in the tech industry experience. In my personal experience, I’ve had these feelings for what feels like forever, so it isn’t unique to being a remote employee. However, I think being a remoteemployee adds a new element to the whole thing. This is what I want to discuss today. ...

On July 5th I started at GitLab. They are an entirely remote company with an amazing product and really fascinating culture. One of the many things I am very excited about is that as much as possible is public info. For instance, you can see their entire company handbook online. Most of the consumers of such a document are team members, but it was able to give me a great idea on what exactly I should expect and how things work around GitLab. I really appreciated this as it gave me a very detailed look at the company, their values, and more! That lets candidates decide for themselves if the company and culture are up to their expectations. Isn’t that awesome? Hell, they even let anyone make a merge request to suggest updates, even people who do not work for GitLab! ...

Recently, I set up my own Gentoo overlay on GitLab with CI using their shared GitLab Runner. I had a lot of trouble at first with getting the CI to cooperate with what I wanted. Getting repoman to work in the docker image was pretty irritating until I found a docker image specifically for testing using repoman. Once I found that, it was super easy! My main purpose for setting up an overlay was primarily to learn how it all works. A friend and I had done it before but I wasn’t quite so familiar with the actual setup. Secondary reason was the desire to use a more recent version of atheme-services as it appears no longer maintained in portage but was recently revived upstream. I have a few other ideas for what I may want to put in there, but for now it is just small time modifications to ebuilds.