GitLab Incubation Engineering, 6 Apr 2022

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From YouTube: Incubation Engineering Jamstack -- Weekly Demo April 6th 2022

Description

Issue link: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/incubation-engineering/jamstack/meta/-/issues/41

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Hi everyone welcome back to the jumpstack incubation engineering update so great to have you back just a quick note on the format. I've now returned to doing these pre-recorded updates, as opposed to live meetings mostly because I can be much more concise here still, I did appreciate the feedback I was able to get during these live meetings, so I think this will still be a similar format, but it's going to be less frequent and yet I think these weekly updates here just are in place for this.

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Now, for an update on what I have been working on, my focus, these last few weeks has been around making the pages onboarding experience just perfect.

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So far, I've developed an onboarding wizard and now I'm actually going to use that for gitlab pages.

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I've talked in my updates before about the challenges of getting that experience right this time. I can actually show you how it all comes together.

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Let's say I have a project that contains the source code for an 11t app, and I want to build and host that with gitlab pages.

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So now I'll go to settings pages, and this page used to look like this, just basically a link to the docs on how to use the gitlab ci email to create a pages job, and this is what it looks like now.

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The first time I visit this page I'll, be not just presented with an empty state. Gitlab knows that I haven't set up pages for this project before so. Let's see this guide on how to do it straight away. It was super important for me to make this look as easy as possible. I'm guiding the user through the complex setup of building that yamaha file step by step.

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So let's go through this and enter what we need here.

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Now the last step is to commit this new gitlab crm. Here's where put in most of my work these last couple of weeks, because when I hit this commit button, it doesn't mean my page is immediately live. First, there are two jobs that need to be completed: one the page's job that builds the html pages of my app and second, a somewhat hidden job added by gitlab when it's when it sees a job named pages that one will take those build files and put them where the gitlab pages server can deliver them.

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So the user now has to wait until all that is done before pages will be available, and since we want to make this easy for people who have never used gitlab pages or even github before we want to, let them know what is happening. So let me hit that commit button and see what happens now.

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Here's a page that says yes, you're done configuring pages now we're waiting on something else to happen with a nice little link to the pipelines where the user can monitor the status, and here we have the opportunity to start the on boarding over. So if we made a mistake, we can generate a completely new gitlab ci jumble again in the future. I can imagine that can give the user some pages settings that don't depend on pages being actually deployed here, so they can start configuring without waiting on the initial deployment to succeed.

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But for now I think this follows the user flow already really really nicely always tells them what is happening and doesn't leave them hanging once the pages job is complete.

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We're able to reload this page and we'll see our familiar pages settings.

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All of this will be behind the feature flag. So we can roll this out carefully and to a subset of users.

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This way we can gather feedback before rolling it out to a wider audience, see if there's something we missed and at the same time we can use this partial rollout to measure the effect on gitlab pages usage right. This was all for today's update as usual. If you have some direct feedback, there's the issue link below it's open for anyone to comment until then. I hope to see you again next week and enjoy your day bye.