GitLab Community Hackathons

DRI: Arianna Haradon

About

GitLab Hackathons bring our community together to improve GitLab. These quarterly events support Contributor Success by providing structured opportunities for community engagement and contribution. For more information and live tracking, please visit the hackathon page.

Workflow

• Owned by the Contributor Success team.
• Typically occurs once per quarter.
• Hackathons run for 7 days (UTC). Any MR opened during the hackathon week must be merged by 31 days after the hackathon week.
  • During the 7 day hackathon period, all community contribution MRs are automatically tagged with the hackathon label and count towards the hackathon.
• Leaderboard here.
• Some hackathons have themes or special bonus prizes like:
  • Smash the most bugs for bonus credits to our Contributor Success store.
  • Product teams create curated issue lists and award community bonuses, ex Knowledge Group Hackathon list.

Collaboration Opportuntites

Contributor Success welcomes new ideas/themes for the hackathon. Please reach out to us on #contributor-success on Slack for internal discussion.

Experiments and results

April 2025 Hackathon

Bug bash bonus prize:

• 250 credit bonus to the contributor who merged the most type::bug merge requests
• Credits were in addition to other hackathon prizes
• Bonus was advertized on all external hackathon announcements.
• Bonus was not advertized on contributors.gitlab.com.

Results:

• No material change in the number of participants or bugs resolved.