Geo Onboarding for Victor Prete

Victor, Welcome to GitLab and to the Geo Team!

We are all excited that you are joining us on the Geo Team. You should have already received an onboarding issue from The People Group familiarizing yourself with GitLab, setting up accounts, accessing tools, etc. This onboarding issue is specific to the Geo Team people, processes and setup.

For the first week or so you should focus on your GitLab onboarding issue. There is a lot of information there, and the first week is very important to get your account information set up correctly. Tasks from this issue can start as you get ready to start contributing to the Geo team.

Much like your GitLab onboarding issue, each item is broken out by Owner: Action. Just focus on "New Team Member" items, and feel free to reach out to your team if you have any questions.

New Team Member

Must Dos

  • Open an access request (AR) to add new team member to geo@gitlab.com email list, @geo-team Slack group, geo-be Google group (might not need AR if already group manager). See example. The manager can also choose to create this AR.
  • Open AR for or add new team member to group-geo in GCP
  • Open AR for Geo staging access. See this AR for an example. The manager can also choose to create this AR.
  • As part of your normal onboarding issue, if you've created a member page for yourself under www-gitlab-com/data/team-members/person/, please add the following - Geo BE Team under departments. See example here
  • Set up coffee chats to meet your teammates
  • Join these Slack channels: #g_geo, #geo_lounge, #development, #backend / #frontend, #engineering-fyi, #company-fyi, #company-fyi-private, #is-this-known, #core-development, #s_tenant_scale, #whats-happening-at-gitlab, #ceo
  • Familiarize yourself with the team boards
  • Add the Geo Team calendar gitlab.com_iil929sjtsnbaki2i58dtidh5s@group.calendar.google.com to your Google calendar as well as Time Off By Deel (Under Calendar Sync, Additional Calendars to include). This will help you see the team's OOO as well as add your OOOs to the team calendar.
  • Read up about the team announcements here or follow the weekly slack announcements pinned in the #geo-lounge channel and in the canvas there
  • Read about your team, its mission, team members and resources on the Geo Team page
  • Discuss with your manager your first issue assignment and work through it with support of your onboarding buddy

Team and Product

After 2-3 Months

  • Set up Geo on GCP with a single node following the docs. Make an MR to update any outdated documentation.
  • Perform a failover with your GCP Geo setup following the docs.
  • Set a reminder to add yourself as a trainee maintainer (Senior Engineer+) or code reviewer (Intermediate Engineer) for GitLab after working here for 3 months. You can do this by adding the appropriate entries to the team page entry file file with which you added yourself to the team page. Here are examples for frontend, and examples for backend. Doing reviews is a good way to help other team members, improve GitLab, and learn more about the code base. Because we use reviewer roulette once you add yourself as a reviewer, people will assign merge requests for you to review.
  • Join PM on at least one customer call
  • Once you've settled into the team and project in the first few weeks, join the support team on customer calls for a few weeks to understand how Geo is used in the real world. Ping the support team in #g_geo and your manager(s) to let them know that you'd like to shadow these calls. After a few calls, consider writing about your experience talking to the customers, or use your experience to improve documentation that is often used by them.
  • Join the refinement process (Phase 2) by letting your EM know you're ready to start helping refine issues in the backlog (this should probably be around the 2 - 3 month period)
  • Read up about how to set up Geo with GitLab Environment Toolkit (GET)
  • Once you've settled in for the first 3+ months, shadow someone and then eventually join the customer support rotations when comfortable enough to do so. Process
  • Read about Geo on staging.gitlab.com
  • Add yourself to CODEOWNERS when ready. This allows you to enter the Geo Reviewer Roulette
  • Read Geo Development Documentation
  • Set up GDK for Geo and apply for an Ultimate license Leave all the default settings when creating the license. This will create a Gitlab issue for you to get a license.
  • Take a look at the GET runner created by Ian - https://gitlab.com/ibaum/get-runner if you are planning to use GET to setup your environment
  • Add yourself to staging ref here and use this page to get access to the GCP Project

Reference

Manager

Edited by Victor Prêté