Community pairing sessions

Informations and guidelines about community pairing sessions

Community pairing sessions

What are they?

The community pairing sessions are community-driven sessions, usually 1 hour long, that anyone from the GitLab community (team members and not) can attend. We cover:

  • Live coding (may be the GitLab project, a satellite project, or something loosely related, and may be backend, frontend, database, documentation, etc.).
  • Triaging issues.
  • Brainstorming ideas.

These sessions are livestreamed on our Community Coders YouTube channel and are thought to be a friendly and informal environment, where everyone is free to express their thoughts (in accordance to the GitLab Code of Conduct).

When do they happen?

Community pairing sessions usually happen every Tuesday at 10:15 UTC. On rare occasions, a scheduled session might be skipped if none of the organizers can attend. Keep an eye on the #pairing channel of the GitLab Discord server for any announcement.

Ad-hoc sessions can be requested by anyone who needs help, or just wants to share some work they’re doing, by asking in the #pairing channel of the GitLab Discord server. Ping one or more of the organizers if you have no reply in about 1 hour, but keep in mind that most of them are located in the UTC+1/UTC+2 timezone.

Where do they happen?

Community pairing sessions are organized using Zoom and the link to join the session can be found:

Preparing for a scheduled session (for organizers)

  • A recurring event exists on Meetup.com, so no manual setup is needed.
  • A scheduled pipeline creates the Discord event each week using a Ruby script.
  • Advertise on social media (optional).

The day of the session:

  • Leave a message in the #pairing channel of the GitLab Discord server to raise awareness and/or decide what to look at during the session.

During the session:

  • Make sure the streaming to YouTube is active.
  • Explain what we’re going to cover during the session.
  • Start having fun!

Organizers

Due to our current workflow to create and attend these sessions, at least one of the organizers must attend in order to be able to livestream to our YouTube channel.

Organizer GitLab handle Discord handle
Lee Tickett @leetickett-gitlab @leetickett
Raimund Hook @stingrayza @stingrayza
James Rushford @jrushford @jrushford
Andrew Smith @espadav8 @espadav8
Marco Zille @zillemarco @zillemarco
Last modified November 29, 2023: Fix redirects (d14ee71a)