Release guild

The release guild is a collection of teammates that serve as release captain for Sourcegraph releases. The guild was formed to establish a cross-team working group of engineers that own the release process.

The release guild can be found in the slack channel #ask-release-guild.

Members

Leadership Sponsor

Release captain selection

The guild leader is responsible for selecting release captains. The current schedule can be found here.

Guild Leader Responsibilities

  • Ensure release captains are identified for minor and patch releases
  • Organizing and adminstrating the release guild, such as establishing policies, procedures, and documenting how we work
  • Being a point of contact for the guild, and being responsible for overall communications to the rest of the guild

Release schedule

As a release captain, you are expected to only be running non-emergency releases during your standard working hours. That means you should alert the guild leader to any timezone conflicts when you are assigned as a captain to a release, and work to find a new time that works for your timezone. The standard release time is 10 AM PST / PDT. You should suggest a replacement time with enough hours to work on the release, typically a full work day in the worst case.

FAQ

I am not sure whether I am the best person to be dedicating time to it?

There probably isn’t any “best person” for this guild. The skills needed are git commands and standard branch troubleshooting and testing. So if you push code to any of our repositories, you qualify!

Approximately how much time should I expect to dedicate to release?

Typically, a release takes place over a few days (2-3). The ticket template has all the steps required to perform a release. It can be hard to estimate how much time it will take because it is hard to gauge the size of the release beforehand. We do not impose any limitations on what can be included

I don’t know whether my team can afford to lose that time?

Your manager and director can help with this, and bring concerns to the leadership team so we can help set priorities appropriately