Trainee FE maintainer (CustomersDot) - Mohamed Moustafa
Basic setup
-
Read the code review page in the handbook and the code review guidelines. -
Understand how to become a maintainer -
Add yourself as a trainee maintainer on the team page. -
Ask your manager to set up a check in on this issue every six weeks or so.
Working towards becoming a maintainer
There is no checklist here, only guidelines. There is no specific timeline on this, but historically most backend trainee maintainers have become maintainers five to seven months after starting their training.
You are free to discuss your progress with your manager or any maintainer at any time. As in the list above, your manager should review this issue with you roughly every six weeks; this is useful to track your progress, and see if there are any changes you need to make to move forward.
It is up to you to ensure that you are getting enough MRs to review, and of varied types. All engineers are reviewers, so you should already be receiving regular reviews from Reviewer Roulette. You could also seek out more reviews from your team, or #backend Slack channels.
Your reviews should aim to cover maintainer responsibilities as well as reviewer responsibilities. Your approval means you think it is ready to merge.
After the new changes to trainee maintainer program, the new process is:
After each review is complete, the reviewer should write up a justification about why they believe the merge request is ready to merge. This justification is then reviewed by the maintainer and if the maintainer agrees with the justification they should add a
Further resource: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1VR-NB4BzAAIQcDa-SrxVc6TqN6gceoFod84J4znBOl4/edit#slide=id.g1287bf62b57_0_209
Note: Do not include reviews of security MRs because review feedback might reveal security issue details.
When you're ready to make it official
When reviews have accumulated, you can confidently address the majority of the MR's assigned to you, and recent reviews consistently fulfill maintainer responsibilities, then you can propose yourself as a new maintainer for the relevant application.
Remember that even when you are a maintainer, you can still request help from other maintainers if you come across an MR that you feel is too complex or requires a second opinion.
-
Create a merge request for team page proposing yourself as a maintainer for the relevant application, assigned to your manager. -
Ask a maintainer to add you as an Owner to the relevant maintainers list in gitlab-org/maintainers/ (e.g. gitlab-org/maintainers/rails-backend for GitLab backend). -
Keep reviewing, start merging 🤘