5 ms·

GitLab team member here. This work was produced by our AI Assist SEG (Single-Engineer Group)[0]. The engineer behind this feature recently uploaded a quick upd

GitLab team member here. This work was produced by our AI Assist SEG (Single-Engineer Group)[0]. The engineer behind this feature recently uploaded a quick update about this work and other things they are working on to YouTube[1]. [0] - https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/incubation/ai-assist/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/incubation/ai-... [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYl0dg8xyeE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYl0dg8xyeE

remram 4y ago
Why do you call this a group? Why don't you say "one of our engineers did this"? I read the linked article [1] and that seems to be the accurate situation: not a group of people including one engineer, not one engineer at a time on a rotation, but literally one person. In what way is that a group? [1]: https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/structure/#single-engineer-groups https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/structure/#single-engi...
- john_cogs 4y ago
  Great question. I'm not entirely clear on the origin of the name and it would probably be hard for me to find the folks behind this decision on Friday evening/Saturday so I'll share my interpretation. At GitLab, we have a clearly defined organizational structure. Within that stucture, we have Product Groups[0] which are groups of people aligned around a specific category. The name "Single-Engineer Groups" reflects that this single engineer owns the category which they're focusing on. I'll be sure to surface your question to the leader of our Incubation Engineering org. Thanks. [0] - https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/structure/#product-groups https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/structure/#product-gro...
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    I imagine it's similar to working groups [0], but keeping the term the same when only one person is in the working group, hence single engineer (working) group. Basically, parse `group` as in `working group` as a single term of art, rather than literally meaning a colloquial group, ie 2 or more individuals. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_group
    - sytse 4y ago
      It is different since working groups are not full time roles.
    - remram 4y ago
      I have nothing against a working group that happens to be one person at the moment, but this SEG is defined by being a single person. It would cease being a SEG if it got more members. Hence don't call it a group...
  - joshxyz 4y ago
    jesus christ john, i cant wrap my head around the concept of single-person group!! haha
    - sitkack 4y ago
      Gitlab is 600Kloc of JS and 1.8Mloc of Ruby. Of course a SEG would make sense to them.
      - westurner 4y ago
        OpenAPI, tests, and {Ruby on Rails w/ Script.aculo.us built-in back in the day, JS, and rewrite in {Rust, Go,}}? There's dokku-scheduler-kubernetes; and Gitea, a fork of Gogs, which is a github clone in Go; but Gitea doesn't do inbound email to Issues, Service Desk Issues, or (Drone,) CI with deploy to k8s revid.staging and production DNS domains w/ Ingress.
    - ebonet 4y ago
      If it makes it easier, our title is Incubation Engineering, because it reflects better what we do: finding new areas to explore and kickstart, searching for new markets, or how to expand existing markets. We need to choose initiatives within our scope (mine is MLOps) that fit the scope of a person in a short period of time, and test the idea by putting stuff in production. Ideas that are too uncertain or risky to dedicate a full team on, but would make sense for a single person initially. Other recent outputs of the team are CloudSeed[0], improved GitLab pages setup [1] and Code Reviews for Jupyter Notebooks [2] - [0] CloudSeed https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/incubation/cloud-seed/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/incubation/clo... - [1] https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2022/09/22/gitlab-15-4-released/#getting-started-with-gitlab-pages-just-got-easier https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2022/09/22/gitlab-15-4-rel... - [2] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/repository/jupyter_notebooks/#cleaner-diffs-and-raw-diffs https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/repository/jupyter_n...
  - Traubenfuchs 4y ago
    > single engineer group oxymoron
    - falcor84 4y ago
      The definitions I see for group all use "a number",e.g. "a number of people or things that are located, gathered, or classed together". So if you're willing to accept 1 as a possible value for a number, it's not an oxymoron.
      - remram 4y ago
        Is 0 people a group by the unusual definition you use?
        falcor84 4y ago
        It is, at least in principle. As I see it, there's nothing that immediately discontinues a group when the last person leaves; it only makes it inactive. But a group could also become inactive in many other ways (e.g. deciding not to meet for a long time). It's only if whatever organization that found a benefit at having that group, no longer does and decides to discontinue it, then it stops being a group.
        remram 4y ago
        What a weird world you live in. What about "the organization"? What if it has 0 people?
        falcor84 4y ago
        The world I live in is one which accepts both usual and unusual circumstances. In the extreme case, consider a small company whose few owners and employees suddenly pass away (e.g. in a plane crash). The fact that the company suddenly has 0 employees and even 0 shareholders does not immediately terminate the company. It still continues to exist as a business and legal entity, until the government / lawyers either find new shareholders (typically heirs) who are willing to run the company, or appoint a director to initiate foreclosure.
- lbotos 4y ago
  John nailed it. A single engineer group is something being explored by one person, but could eventually represent a "product group" in the future. See https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#single-engineer-groups https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#single-engineer-groups for more things that could be explored by such a person. If you think there is a better name to capture that I'm sure it would be considered.
  - pookeh 4y ago
    Tiger (team)
- sidlls 4y ago
  I’m always suspicious of “one engineer did this” projects. There are probably quite a few engineers, product people and other employees who are simply unattributed for this.
  - stefan_ 4y ago
    Well, the guy that wrote this fibonacci function that the model reproduced verbatim from some "learn to program" site sure went unattributed. That's AI for you.
    - ksaj 4y ago
      To try it out, I wrote a Hello World function, and it literally named the tutorial it was taken from. (ie: Hello, Tutorialname!) So it definitely happens often enough, although usually it is probably harder to tell when straight up plagiarism has occurred.
  - moyix 4y ago
    Well, on the FauxPilot side I did do the initial implementation personally (over the course of a few weeks this summer) – but of course I'm building on the work the Salesforce team put into training the CodeGen models, and the work NVIDIA did in creating the FasterTransformer inference library and Triton inference server that FauxPilot uses. I don't know how things are organized within GitLab, but it's pretty plausible to me that one engineer could put together the completion portion of the VSCode extension – you can see the code here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-vscode-extension/-/blob/main/src/completion/gitlab_code_completion_provider.ts https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-vscode-extension/-/blob... Fred has also been providing pull requests to improve FauxPilot, which I very much appreciate! :)
  - ebonet 4y ago
    Another SEG here (our title is Incubation Engineer now, my area is MLOps). It is true that we build on top of what others did. What we mean by single engineer group is that is a one-person-team: we are responsible from the end-to-end project, from defining the vision, to talking to customers, to implementing the solution, and delivering a product. This is a relative new team (a bit more that one year). https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/incubation/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/incubation/
- wharfjumper 4y ago
  Classic off by one error.
- RobotToaster 4y ago
  "one of our engineers did this" isn't a technical sounding acronym.
  - remram 4y ago
    Does it have to be an acronym? You could totally say "Fred de Gier at GitLab is working on this".

remram 4y ago

Why do you call this a group? Why don't you say "one of our engineers did this"? I read the linked article [1] and that seems to be the accurate situation: not a group of people including one engineer, not one engineer at a time on a rotation, but literally one person. In what way is that a group? [1]: https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/structure/#single-engineer-groups https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/structure/#single-engi...

john_cogs 4y ago
Great question. I'm not entirely clear on the origin of the name and it would probably be hard for me to find the folks behind this decision on Friday evening/Saturday so I'll share my interpretation. At GitLab, we have a clearly defined organizational structure. Within that stucture, we have Product Groups[0] which are groups of people aligned around a specific category. The name "Single-Engineer Groups" reflects that this single engineer owns the category which they're focusing on. I'll be sure to surface your question to the leader of our Incubation Engineering org. Thanks. [0] - https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/structure/#product-groups https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/structure/#product-gro...
- cercatrova 4y ago
  I imagine it's similar to working groups [0], but keeping the term the same when only one person is in the working group, hence single engineer (working) group. Basically, parse `group` as in `working group` as a single term of art, rather than literally meaning a colloquial group, ie 2 or more individuals. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_group
  - sytse 4y ago
    It is different since working groups are not full time roles.
  - remram 4y ago
    I have nothing against a working group that happens to be one person at the moment, but this SEG is defined by being a single person. It would cease being a SEG if it got more members. Hence don't call it a group...
- joshxyz 4y ago
  jesus christ john, i cant wrap my head around the concept of single-person group!! haha
  - sitkack 4y ago
    Gitlab is 600Kloc of JS and 1.8Mloc of Ruby. Of course a SEG would make sense to them.
    - westurner 4y ago
      OpenAPI, tests, and {Ruby on Rails w/ Script.aculo.us built-in back in the day, JS, and rewrite in {Rust, Go,}}? There's dokku-scheduler-kubernetes; and Gitea, a fork of Gogs, which is a github clone in Go; but Gitea doesn't do inbound email to Issues, Service Desk Issues, or (Drone,) CI with deploy to k8s revid.staging and production DNS domains w/ Ingress.
  - ebonet 4y ago
    If it makes it easier, our title is Incubation Engineering, because it reflects better what we do: finding new areas to explore and kickstart, searching for new markets, or how to expand existing markets. We need to choose initiatives within our scope (mine is MLOps) that fit the scope of a person in a short period of time, and test the idea by putting stuff in production. Ideas that are too uncertain or risky to dedicate a full team on, but would make sense for a single person initially. Other recent outputs of the team are CloudSeed[0], improved GitLab pages setup [1] and Code Reviews for Jupyter Notebooks [2] - [0] CloudSeed https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/incubation/cloud-seed/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/incubation/clo... - [1] https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2022/09/22/gitlab-15-4-released/#getting-started-with-gitlab-pages-just-got-easier https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2022/09/22/gitlab-15-4-rel... - [2] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/repository/jupyter_notebooks/#cleaner-diffs-and-raw-diffs https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/repository/jupyter_n...
- Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  > single engineer group oxymoron
  - falcor84 4y ago
    The definitions I see for group all use "a number",e.g. "a number of people or things that are located, gathered, or classed together". So if you're willing to accept 1 as a possible value for a number, it's not an oxymoron.
    - remram 4y ago
      Is 0 people a group by the unusual definition you use?
      - falcor84 4y ago
        It is, at least in principle. As I see it, there's nothing that immediately discontinues a group when the last person leaves; it only makes it inactive. But a group could also become inactive in many other ways (e.g. deciding not to meet for a long time). It's only if whatever organization that found a benefit at having that group, no longer does and decides to discontinue it, then it stops being a group.
        remram 4y ago
        What a weird world you live in. What about "the organization"? What if it has 0 people?
        falcor84 4y ago
        The world I live in is one which accepts both usual and unusual circumstances. In the extreme case, consider a small company whose few owners and employees suddenly pass away (e.g. in a plane crash). The fact that the company suddenly has 0 employees and even 0 shareholders does not immediately terminate the company. It still continues to exist as a business and legal entity, until the government / lawyers either find new shareholders (typically heirs) who are willing to run the company, or appoint a director to initiate foreclosure.
lbotos 4y ago
John nailed it. A single engineer group is something being explored by one person, but could eventually represent a "product group" in the future. See https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#single-engineer-groups https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#single-engineer-groups for more things that could be explored by such a person. If you think there is a better name to capture that I'm sure it would be considered.
- pookeh 4y ago
  Tiger (team)
sidlls 4y ago
I’m always suspicious of “one engineer did this” projects. There are probably quite a few engineers, product people and other employees who are simply unattributed for this.
- stefan_ 4y ago
  Well, the guy that wrote this fibonacci function that the model reproduced verbatim from some "learn to program" site sure went unattributed. That's AI for you.
  - ksaj 4y ago
    To try it out, I wrote a Hello World function, and it literally named the tutorial it was taken from. (ie: Hello, Tutorialname!) So it definitely happens often enough, although usually it is probably harder to tell when straight up plagiarism has occurred.
- moyix 4y ago
  Well, on the FauxPilot side I did do the initial implementation personally (over the course of a few weeks this summer) – but of course I'm building on the work the Salesforce team put into training the CodeGen models, and the work NVIDIA did in creating the FasterTransformer inference library and Triton inference server that FauxPilot uses. I don't know how things are organized within GitLab, but it's pretty plausible to me that one engineer could put together the completion portion of the VSCode extension – you can see the code here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-vscode-extension/-/blob/main/src/completion/gitlab_code_completion_provider.ts https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-vscode-extension/-/blob... Fred has also been providing pull requests to improve FauxPilot, which I very much appreciate! :)
- ebonet 4y ago
  Another SEG here (our title is Incubation Engineer now, my area is MLOps). It is true that we build on top of what others did. What we mean by single engineer group is that is a one-person-team: we are responsible from the end-to-end project, from defining the vision, to talking to customers, to implementing the solution, and delivering a product. This is a relative new team (a bit more that one year). https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/incubation/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/incubation/
wharfjumper 4y ago
Classic off by one error.
RobotToaster 4y ago
"one of our engineers did this" isn't a technical sounding acronym.
- remram 4y ago
  Does it have to be an acronym? You could totally say "Fred de Gier at GitLab is working on this".