March 2026 lunch & learn with the Gerrit community

Another Month, Another GerritMeets

Join us as Ponch walks us through some advanced ref management techniques to ensure your data stays safe and visible only to the right people!

Due to your favourite host getting married, and the whole GerritForge team attending said wedding, this month we'll be doing a remote event on GerritForgeTV, but don't worry, the content will still be great and we'll be back on the road soon!

Agenda Highlights:
Lightning Talk 1: git-refs-filter - Controlling Ref Visibility at Scale

Large Gerrit instances often struggle with noisy or overly broad ref
advertisement, especially in mono-repo setups. This talk introduces the
git-refs-filter module and shows how to shape which refs are visible to
clients during Git operations. I’ll cover where ref filtering fits in the request path and what is the performance gain to expect. The session includes practical configuration and preformance boost examples.

Lightning Talk 2: ref-protection - Enforcing Guardrails for Critical Branches and Tags

Protecting high-value refs requires more than social conventions. This talk focuses on the ref-protection plugin and how it helps enforce policy on updates to sensitive refs (for example release branches and protected tags). I’ll walk through common protection models, how policy checks integrate with Gerrit workflows, and how to balance strict enforcement with developer velocity.

Speaker:
Ponch, Gerrit contributor for the best part of the last 7 years and the latest addition to the maintainers team, will be giving both talks, he hasn't presented in a while and was feeling the urge to make up for it.

Where:
Remote event streamed on GerritForgeTV