Hi! Here's a little bit about me.

My name is Sarah Crowle (she/they), and I'm an Associate Support Engineer here at GitLab. I bounce back and forth between a lot of different things here, so you might have run into me before. If so, hello again! If not, nice to meet you :)

I have a high level of understanding of many parts of the GitLab product, but I'm never done learning! Some specific things I enjoy and specialize in are:

• Static and dynamic security analysis features (SAST/DAST). I especially love digging into the "meat" of our analyzers and rulesets.
• CI/CD pipeline troubleshooting, especially the more bleeding-edge stuff.
• Investigating "weird" issues. I love "codebase diving", and the more of it I get to do the more fun it becomes!
• Honing my workflow! It's easy to get bogged down in endlessly iterating on your workflow, but when you hit that balance where you're incrementally improving things as you go, nothing in the world feels better!

I'm also constantly trying to expand and deepen my knowledge of just about anything I can! Some highlights:

• I've started getting into our container and package registry features lately!
• I've been learning quite a lot through getting involved and contributing to GitLab Detective, a tool to automatically check GitLab instances for known issues.
• I'm trying very hard to understand Gitaly. I'm getting there 😅.

Contributions I'm proud of

• I've contributed a couple of GitLab Detective checks, and I'm hoping to contribute even more!
• I actually like writing documentation (wild, right?), and I try to contribute to our documentation whenever I can. I'm especially proud of my work on documenting recommended SAST exclusions and email notification troubleshooting.
• Early in my GitLab career, I contributed a fix for an issue with generating our handbook, which fixed many broken links across the entire text of the handbook despite being a relatively small change. That's the best kind of fix 😌.
• I documented a fairly obscure but reasonably common mistake when autoscaling GitLab Runner that had been a huge source of confusion for our customers for quite a long time.
• I've written a couple of knowledge base articles to serve as a source of truth for some slightly obscure edge cases in the GitLab product! I'm hoping to make that even more in the future :)

How to contact me

Generally speaking, I'm reachable on Slack. Otherwise, I'm probably working on a ticket and interacting with our customers that way. If you need to get a hold of me, reach out on Slack or drop a ping in an issue/MR!

Availability

I currently live in Calgary, which is located in Western Canada in the Mountain time zone. That means my working hours are roughly 15:30-22:30 UTC. If you contact me outside of those hours, I'll do my best to reply as soon as I'm back in the office!

Fun stuff about me!

Outside of work I like to write code and play music! Here are some things I've been up to lately:

• Right now I'm trying to learn graphics programming through working on a heavily modified fork of an ancient vintage raytracer called Rayshade. That's led me to some wild places, including writing an implementation of OpenGL which is able to run some old video games using my raytracer as a backend!
• In general, the weirder the project the more fun I have. A while back I did a string of ports of virtualization/CPU emulation software such as QEMU and Bochs to platforms like the Apple TV or MS-DOS, for some reason!
• I mostly play guitar and keyboard, and I've been working on "finishing" my music setup. It's... never finished 😔. Noise pop is like that I suppose.