GitLab’s mission is to make it so that everyone can contribute. While I have been experiencing this mission for three years, I wondered if there was a way to visualize the effect of having everyone contribute over GitLab's history. It turns out there is. An open source project known as Gource can create an animated visualization of the commit history of a repository. I ran it against the GitLab repository and it visualizes 11 years of busy developers contributing over 300,000 commits to GitLab - covered in just under 10 minutes of video. Each node in the visualization is a file and the count of various file types is shown on the left.
A big thank you to absolutely everyone who has made contributions to GitLab over the years. Hopefully this visualization helps you have a greater sense of this community.
GitLab has recently published the management principles that help enable the "everyone can contribute" mission within GitLab. This new people management framework is called TeamOps. Everyone can learn and become certified in TeamOps through GitLab’s learning portal.
As another mile marker of the power of the everyone can contribute mission, GitLab also just celebrated one year as a public company!
I hope you enjoy Gource’s video visualization, which is filled with the glow of light - seems very appropriate for the many global cultural festivals at this time of year that use light and fireworks to celebrate their communities!
If you'd like to become a contributor, check out our contribution guide.
