GitLab Digital Experience, 1 Jun 2023

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From YouTube: Digital Experience Retro - June 1, 2023

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Handbook page: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/digital-experience/

A

Hi everyone uh welcome to digital experience. This is our iteration retro. um Today is Thursday June 1st I will go over some of the things that went well from this iteration and some things to improve. On uh the first point for things that went well, I think is Lauren yeah.

B

uh Just want to say great job John and the whole decks team on releasing the localized marketing site. It was a very large release and all of us have have worked on that and it's it's really nice to see it in production and we get to iterate from here. So great job.

C

um Just plus one all of that I think that's great and also like great work Lauren for leading all of that. It was like so chaotic and so messy and um it felt like a long time, but also like so quick at the same time so um yeah just plus one to all of that.

B

Yeah and I'm putting another one in there great job Megan. um She did her first full nav release last week and she's a pro now. um So that's awesome.

C

B

Then also um back to Megan um great job on the Marketo email template. That's awesome! It's a you had to dive into a whole new platform with their different. You know coding, specs and um you delivered something that was flexible and just really awesome. So great job, Megan.

B

Okay, I guess I'll Dive, Right In to things to improve on um and I'd love to hear some feedback from the whole team. But yesterday yesterday's release was so stressful, and this is one of those days. I had like a one-on-one with bills at the end of the day and I was just like, um so you know, I I think there's some things.

B

I could have done better like being calm um and not making quick decisions, but I want to hear from the team like what do you think we can do to make large releases like that um smoother and hopefully less stressful? For the team.

A

I know you and I had a one-on-one kind of in the middle of the release. So I got to hear parts of it. But can you summarize what all happened which parts went, went wrong and and do you have kind of an idea of the different pieces.

B

Yeah, so we got um 30 ammo files yesterday morning for all of the human translated content, so that was kind of like oh wow, it's all here. Maybe we can get it, but we couldn't get it done in time um and then, when I went to go test, the localized site I noticed that the pricing page had like kind of a regression on the English version which spooked me out. I was like.

C

B

Whoa, okay can't be can't be doing that um and so then decided to make the call of removing the home page and the pricing localized versions from the release that created a lot of complexity.

B

So I think that you know was the first mistake, is changing scope during a planned release um and then actually increased complexity, but we got through it and we're ready to go, and then I realized that these Legacy home pages that I had removed were still existing in our CDN cache, which was preventing us from releasing the whole site, because in that case the language selector would show up on the home page.

B

It would go to these Legacy ones from like two years ago that had the wrong price on them, which we definitely you know couldn't do that um we solved it. So that was cool but I.

B

It's just there's a lot. There's a lot of Mrs. You can.

D

B

To that release, issue and we'll see like nine or ten, so it's kind of the the summary but then got to work today and Legacy home pages were gone. We got, you know patched up some other things and now it's out there and that feels really good.

E

Maybe having this big Pages be their own separate release, always like the home page and the pricing page, not bundling them with the rest of the pages.

B

Yeah, that's that's a really good call out, um because is you know three more home pages and three more pricing pages in the same Mrs, this big.

A

I think one thing like kind of a what I noticed anyway, a good call was saying we're not going to release this today, like you said yesterday, like we're holding off on this I. Think that being able to make that call is also important like just knowing that it's not worth the risk of putting out something that might be broken.

A

I know we love to like test it in prod, but, like you know, I'm glad that you had the foresight to be like this can go out tomorrow and like No One's Gonna Die like it's gonna, be fine. um So, like good call on that, because it sounds like just whack-a-mole of issues, um yeah.

B

It's also selfish I didn't want to work last night I wanted to close my computer and be done. You know and John had to you know the concert to go to show. So thank.

F

You for that, thank you, foreign.

B

Yeah I think this is something just to be cognizant of, especially as we roll out large, like digital transformation changes such as the CMS um and when, like continued localization goes in. You know this. This isn't going to be the the last big release. We do there's it's going to be more.

D

You think this is maybe another reason like we want. We'd want to spin up some sort of a staging. It's not just review app. We have like an environment that can hold everything, so we could really test. It then say: yep we're good.

D

What's now merge it over kind of a thing.

B

Yeah I'll say all the review apps between the nav release and the buyer experience Mrs and localization. It got a little confusing to keep track of.

E

Did the issues appear in the review? Apps foreign was just like in production.

B

The Legacy pages did not appear in the review apps it. Those were production issues related to our CDN.

E

Could be useful to have the staging environment that Justin mentions in those cases.

E

We will have to have a CDN on that environment too. Maybe.

D

Are fast looking big into like a static staging environments here, but here's what it's going to be, maybe maybe it would help to like alleviate some of these things. I also know we run into somebody's like tested and Broad kind of situations around one trust and some cookie consent and things that you can't test and review at because of for whatever reason. But if we had like a more of a true staging environment, maybe that would help us got some things there.

A

Yeah I think one of the things about review apps is like it spins up a new URL right, like every review. App creates like this new kind of unique URL, so it kind of like handles its own caching, because it's a brand new URL.

A

um So if we have a consistent like staging document.com or whatever you know about docketlab.com, um if we're going to see caching issues, we would probably see it on that staging environment which is kind of nice, because it would be like a consistent URL.

B

Justin, what do you think about devoting some time to investigating like the scope, bringing that staging environment back up um I? Think things have changed since the last time we had it well.

D

And that's I think it's a good thing to yes think about, and it would be our staging environment. It wouldn't be like shared with the teams doing their thing. It's like we need to be able to test our stuff, verify it and then push it. Like I said we have these big localization CMS.

D

Something else is going to come down. We want to be able to test it. One trust I know, there's a lot of legal stuff going on with like European data and whatnot. So it's hard for us to do things. I know um like even Mateo working on the Marketo error thing like pushing up like 15 Mrs, just to see if something works be great to just have like a real environment.

D

So we're not we're not running the risk of like pushing something to the test and potentially breaking something live in production, and we have to wait the you know: 15-20 minutes to revert it, so it would be great to have some more of a static staging, so yeah I think it's probably a good thing to think about.

B

Let's jump down to two we're ready uh so with when things change on our key conversion, Pages home, page pricing, um how are we going to ensure those changes get to our localized Pages?

B

um One example that you know if we would have pushed the home page yesterday is that pill we just added on the hero to promote gitlab 16. doesn't exist on the pages, the home pages that we localized. So that would be like one example.

F

D

One is tricky because.

F

uh We some people might not know if the localized, if the page that they are updating, is localized or not. uh So a little reminder that we could add in in our measure request will be a new check item in the template uh asking for the engineers to verify, if the page that they are updating is localized, uh I think I believe it's not.

F

uh It will not ensure that everyone will do it, because it's a lot of work and a lot of pages, but as a reminder, I believe it's it's a good approach as a peer starter.

B

uh On that note, um some of the translation team would like is that when a file is returned translated um that content isn't updated on it, so that trans translations all run through their, they call it MCAT tool which they've have specified like vocabulary and like strings and stuff for how to translate.

B

But it'd be great that if we didn't have to do that, all the time good uh Justin.

D

Yeah yeah my mother point in uh having average talking about this. A little bit um kill thing isn't like as a huge big deal, because, though some of those props in the hero like if it's not there. Yes, it's we're missing content. I should get what should be added I'm more concerned about. You know we someone pushes a complete new new feature to a hero component. That requires a net new prop.

D

It should happen to break some of the local localized Pages, because the components updated missing the prop to render something directly in a manager or something it's like yeah there's a lot of thinking. We have to think we have to now think about when we start doing. Some of these things um make sure that uh we had a new feature. A new I guess, maybe don't even feature like an option to like make it change the color or swap from left to right or whatever it might be.

D

That we'd have to like yeah test, make sure that values out added to every single localized page as well.

B

Yeah QA just tripled for for pages that are localized, so add a little extra. You know time when you're, when you're planning your your workload on something like that.

A

Could we add some kind of like pre-commit hook that checks if a Content page has been updated? A Content file has been updated if that file also has French and Japanese and German like gives a warning or something um something annoying like prettier. You know.

A

It feels a little clunky, but maybe there's something that can just be a gentle reminder, especially if it's not us updating the content.

B

I, like that idea, it's like a pipeline could be a pipeline job like a pipeline warning.

D

Yeah I think this will work like 90 of the time, maybe even more like if there was a checker that was like um notice that they're an English Yamaha has been updated and then it checks the translated version and if they are not updated on or after the most recent one, it throws an error. It just text like the update date or commit data or whatever most files that might like I, said like most of the time.

D

Unless we, unless you update the French page first and then English, you know, maybe you should I, don't know it is kind of like a wouldn't want to create, like a huge bottleneck or something like that. A failure, but at the same time, like yeah I, do agree like there needs to be something also specifically for people who update Pages most pages that we update are they're translated.

D

We are code owners for but some pages other people are updating. They don't know this process and they're just going to push an update and things are going to be out of sync. So there was a pipeline checker for other folks in the business you actually watch. Content updates, that'll be good.

B

Yeah I like I like that idea and the only catch would be having to not break our pipeline but yeah. Let's look into that hold um yeah. Do some work on that investigation next iteration.

B

Pass it over to Laura to close us out.

A

Thank you, everyone for watching and we'll see you next time and we have to wait because I'm misleading.