GitLab Developer Evangelism Team, 23 Mar 2020

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From YouTube: The Remote Stack

Description

GitLab's Brendan O'Leary (https://twitter.com/olearycrew) shares thoughts on how to minimize your tool stack to the essentials, avoid tool sprawl, and focus on the required business capabilities for running a remote enterprise. After that, we take a look at GitLab's #RemoteStack and how we use those various tools to enable our business and reinforce our values.

Level up your remote transition! TechCrunch called our Remote Playbook "a valuable resource for anyone who is trying to find a way to function in a #RemoteWork environment." Download our Remote Playbook for 🆓 right now: https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/

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Thanks for watching this gitlab video! today, I want to share a little bit about.

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The remote stack. we'll discuss the tools required to build and run a business in.

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A remote environment., my name is brennan o'leary and I'm a developer evangelist.

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At gitlab., you can find me on twitter at @olearycrew and I'll be happy to.

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Discuss anything in this video in more detail, if you have questions. gitlab is.

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The largest all remote company in the world, as such, we've chosen tools built.

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For that purpose and we'll discuss how and why we made those decisions.

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Throughout this video., you can also use the hashtag #allremote to learn more.

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About how gitlab and other companies look at remote work., as with everything.

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Gitlab does how we make our decisions about. Our tech. Stack must align with our.

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Values as a company., those values, collaboration, results, efficiency,.

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Diversity and inclusion, iteration, and transparency color every decision. We.

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Make including about what tools we use. tools must enable our way of.

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Collaborating, allowing us to share transparently with the world, or at least.

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Within the company., our decision-making process and the outcomes of those.

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Decisions, they must be efficient tools and we often end up with what we.

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Lovingly call boring solutions and every gitlab team member is encouraged to.

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Spend company money like it's their own, so any tool purchase is carefully.

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Considered and examined to ensure that it is a prudent investment. efficiency is.

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At the heart of everything we do while functioning remotely as an experiment or.

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For an extended period of time, you should try and minimize your tool.

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Stack a collaborative documentation platform such as google docs,, a.

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Company-Wide chat tool like microsoft teams or slack,, and video chat like zoom.

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Are all you need to get started. if your team also needs access to internal.

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Systems to review pn, it's critical to ensure that everyone has easy access and.

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The instructions on their usage are very clear.. At gitlab, our technology stack.

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Mirrors a very similar, simple set of tools that every team member has access.

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To which allow us to collaborate and get work done., these tools help us tightly.

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Integrate our values into our work by writing things down optimizing for the.

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Entire company, rather than specific departments, even a single source of truth for all decision-making. Let's take a quick look.

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At each of these aspects of our remote stack and how we decided to incorporate.

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Those tools into our stack first, everyone must have access to a computer.

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That allows them to get their job done wherever they are for this purpose, we have chosen to have mostly macbooks, as our computer of.

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Choice, while some more technically advanced folks may use linux on their.

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Laptop the majority of gitlab team members are on mac os on a company.

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Provided macbook, this allows us to have a consistent user experience and.

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Provides a boring solution for top-tier hardware, reliability for every team.

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Member, almost as critical as the computers we use is the office equipment.

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Surrounding your computer, yet lab provides employees the freedom to.

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Purchase the equipment they need but recommends a few essentials. These.

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Include a comfortable desk and chair external monitor and keyboard and mouse.

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As well as a dedicated microphone for video calls other equipment that a team.

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Member needs can be purchased and expensed so that they are not limited in.

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Their productivity and can be managers of one to understand what they need to.

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Get their job done for video conferencing, we use the world leading.

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Business video conferencing, app zoom. zoom, provides reliable meetings with audio.

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And video to help team members interact in a more natural way than to the.

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Traditional conference call zoom also allows us to host webinars with outside.

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Participants share our screens and even livestream many meetings directly to our.

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Youtube channel zoom also integrates directly with our.

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Main enterprise chat application. Slack slack allows us to communicate between.

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Team members, either synchronously or asynchronously channels, exist a git lab.

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For very a large variety of topics, this could be an event or a project that a.

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Team is working on a long-standing team channel for answering questions or even.

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Channels that are strictly about socializing with one another in an all.

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Remote environment having these various methods of communication is critical for.

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Connecting team members and get lab is public by default and thus encourages.

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Most decisions to happen in public channels that way if another team.

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Members input is needed with a problem or decision, they can easily be pulled.

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Into the conversation with a simple admin for other documentation and communication, google docs provides an.

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Excellent multiplayer capability that lets team members take notes and share.

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Ideas quickly, every single meeting at gitlab has at least two things: a zoom.

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Link and a google doc with an agenda.: these are the basic requirements of any.

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Mean- and they help that ensure that those meetings are both effective and.

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Efficient all team members are encouraged to take notes. Ask questions.

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Via the google doc or collaborate on slides or spreadsheets in google docs as well.

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And lastly, we'd be remiss to not point out another tool that is critical.

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To our collaboration get lab a get lab. We believe that eating your own dog food.

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Or drinking your own champagne, depending on your preference, is one of the most.

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Critical things that we can do to make our products better gitlab, the software.

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Was born out of the need to have a collaboration tool that developers could.

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Also build and collaborate on together, hence it's a natural extension that we.

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Use get lab to make it lab, but it's not only our engineering department that.

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Uses gitlab everyone from marketing to legal to customer success, uses gitlab.

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In some capacity, if it's to edit a process, then we'll update the handbook.

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Using our web ide, if it's organizing an event or content to calendar that will.

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Happen in issues and milestones, or even if it comes to operating, get lab comm.

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Itself at scale we use, get lab to build test and deploy gitlab. It's very meta.

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Thank you for watching this video. You can find out more at about.gitlab.com/handbook.

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Or on twitter, at @gitlab or the hashtag #allremote.