GitLab Transcend Hackathon: Wh... Note
GitLab

GitLab Transcend Hackathon: What developers built on GitLab Orbit

GitLab Orbit, a live queryable graph of code, merge requests, pipelines, and ownership, enabled developers to tackle real production problems. Developers used Orbit to quickly answer questions about change impact, test relevance, and migration costs. A hackathon showcasing Orbit's capabilities attracted 1,576 developers who submitted 265 projects. Contributors also enhanced the Orbit codebase itself with new features and bug fixes.A significant trend was the development of tools to predict what changes might break before merging. Many projects focused on improving codebase comprehension and onboarding for new developers. Other common themes included incident root-cause analysis, architecture drift detection, and vulnerability tracing.The hackathon winners demonstrated innovative uses of Orbit's context for change impact, migration pricing, and efficient test execution. Sankofa provided immediate context on change blast radius, vulnerability paths, and issue summaries. Carver offered accurate migration pricing by analyzing dependency graphs. CrossCut optimized CI by running only relevant tests based on code changes.Carver's usability winner impressed with its clear, risk-flagged migration cost estimates. Marshal focused on autonomous, goal-driven migrations across multiple repositories. Transcend creatively built a reasoning engine on top of Orbit using semantic web technologies for complex queries. The community's creations highlighted Orbit's power as a foundational platform for contextualized development.