I had the pleasure of attending the latest Hackhathon and Gerrit User Summit in San Diego, at the beginning of October and I want to start by extending a thank you to GerritForge Inc. and Qualcomm for organizing it. 

It’s been good to see new faces participating, particularly at the User Summit. The hackathon allowed us to explore different topics, from performance improvements to AI integration.

The main outcomes were the following:

• JGit performance improvements: Multi-pack index (MIDX for short) is a feature already present in CGit, where it proved to bring a significant performance improvement in object lookup. We managed to implement a PoC in JGit for the MIDX loader and use it in the code. Some basic initial profiling provided a 63% improvement in performance on upload-pack! Not bad for a three-day work! Here is the list of JGit changes. Stay tuned for further development.
• New AI model implementation: the existing ChatGPT plugin has been renamed and abstracted to accommodate other AI models (i.e. Llama).
• Message of the day plugin: The Message of the Day plugin is a simple plugin for displaying messages to users, for example, during maintenance operations. Currently, the plugin requires configuration changes to set it up, which can be tedious for Gerrit admins daily. Some changes have been made to allow the plugin to be configured via the UI.

The user summit was rich of talks around version upgrades and Gerrit running in k8s, among other topics. Here is a quick summary of the talks, which will be published on GerritForge TV:

• Version upgrades: Qualcomm proposed a talk describing their use case while migrating from 2.7 to 3.5 their high-availability installation. On the same note, we, as GerritForge, proposed a different approach to migrations, bringing a new pattern to the community to minimize disruptions, particularly when migrating many versions in one go. We described some use cases of customers we helped migrate on a project basis rather than a “big bang” approach.
• K8s Gerrit: SAP described the now mature high-availability setup internally used running Gerrit on K8s, using the operator implemented in the k8s Gerrit project. We, as GerritForge, illustrated the changes we did to the same project to allow Gerrit to run in a multi-site fashion, leveraging a share-nothing architecture.
• The expensive re-check button: research from the University of Waterloo presented by Prof. Shane Mcintosh illustrated the “hidden” costs behind the bad habit of a “simple” re-triggering of test suites because of non-deterministic test behaviors. The case study presented was on the OpenStack project.
• What’s new in 3.11: Qualcomm presented interesting features and bug fixes for the soon-to-be-released Gerrit version.
• Git repo maintenance made easy: SCMs are a mission-critical part of any software-related business. GerritForge talked about GHS, an AI-driven approach to maintaining the performance of busy Git repositories that undergo heavy workloads.

These and many other topics were discussed during the conference and unconference section of the user summit. This is it for now, but I am looking forward to the next User Summit to meet with the community and come up with new interesting discussions.