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Note that this documentation is a convenience guide for TPA members. The actual, authoritative policy for "Leave" is in thee employee handbook (currently TPI Team Handbook v2 - Fall 2025 Update.docx-2.pdf)), in the "5.1 Leave" section.

Planning your leave

Long before taking a leave (think "months"), you should:

  1. plan the leave with your teammates to ensure service continuity and delegation
  2. for personal time off (as opposed to all-hands holidays):
    1. consult the handbook to see how much of a leave you can take, and how far in advance you need to notify
    2. for a week or more, fill in the correct form (currently the task delegation form) and send it in time to your team lead/director for approval, and teammates for information
    3. once approved, register your leave in the AFK calendar in Nextcloud
  3. cancel and or reschedule your recurring meetings in the calendar for the period you leave

Special tips for team leads

For all hands holidays:

  1. consider sending an email to tor-project@ to ask for last minute requests long before the holidays, see this thread for a good example
  2. remind the team that they should plan their vacations and consider which projects they want to complete before then
  3. reschedule team meetings

Preparing to leave

That's it, your leave was approved (or it's a all-hands closure), and you need to prepare your stuff.

On your last week:

  1. ensure your tasks and projects are completed, put on hold, or properly delegated, inform or consult stakeholders
  2. clean up your inbox, GitLab todo list, etc, if humanly possible
  3. review your GitLab dashboards: make sure your "Doing" queue is empty before your leave and the "Next" issues have received updates that will keep the triage-bot happy for your holidays
  4. remind people of your leave and pending issues, explicitly delegate issues that require care!
  5. double-check the rotation calendar to make sure it works with your plan
  6. renew your OpenPGP key if it will expire during your vacation
  7. resolve pending alarms or silence ones you know are harmless and might surprise people while you're away, consider checking the disk usage dashboard to see if any disk will fill up while you're gone

Special tips for stars and leads

For all hands holidays, you might be on leave, but still in rotation. To ensure a quiet rotation holiday (ideally handled by the star before the holiday):

  1. start tracking alerts: try to reduce noise as much as possible, especially look for flapping, recurring alerts that should be silenced to keep things quiet for the holidays, see

  2. review the main Grafana dashboard and Karma: look for OOM errors, pending upgrades or reboots, and other pending alerts

  3. look for non-production Puppet environment deployments, see this dashboard or the Fabric command:

    fab prometheus.query-to-series -e 'count(count(puppet_status{environment!="production"}) without (state)) by (environment)'

  4. finish triaging unanswered issues

  5. review the team's dashboards for "needs information", "needs review", and "doing" labels, those should either be empty or handled

When you leave

On your last day:

  1. fill in all time sheets to cover the time before your leave as normal
  2. pre-fill your time sheets for your leave time, typically as "RPTO" for normal leave, "Other FF" for closures and "Holiday" for bank holidays, but refer to the handbook for specifics
  3. set an auto-reply on your email, if you can
  4. set yourself as busy in GitLab

Take your leave

While you're away:

  1. stop reading IRC / Matrix / email, except perhaps once a week to avoid build-up
  2. have cake (or pie), enjoy a cold or hot beverage
  3. look at the stars, the sky, the sea, the mountains, the trains; hangout with your friends, family, pets; write, sing, shout, think, sleep, walk, sleepwalk; or whatever it is you planned (or not) for your holidays

When you return

On your first day:

  1. make sure you didn't forget to fill your time sheets
  2. remove the auto-reply
  3. unset yourself as busy in GitLab
  4. say hi on IRC / Matrix
  5. catch up with email (this might take multiple days for long leaves, it's okay)
  6. check for alerts in monitoring, see if you can help your colleagues in case of fire