Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO • Hacker News Board

Re: Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO

#141

Post by harrisonjackson » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 3:46 PM UTC

jl-gitlab wrote: post #130

harrisonjackson wrote: post #128

I am a huge fan of gitlab. We are in the process of moving our github org over. We love!! the gitlab ci tools. We use them extensively for mobile cicd. The gitlab ci runner is super easy to get running and coordinates well with a host and vm setup. We run it on a mac min sitting on my desk and have never had any issues with it. My only nitpick is the regex matching they do to mask protected environment variables from…

Hey, CI/CD PM here. I'd love to learn more about how you're using GitLab for mobile, if you're up for it ping me at @jlenny on gitlab.com. It's an area of focus for us, and it's always great to get to know another person who is using that use case.

We use it with Fastlane to automate our entire build and delivery pipeline. We set it up for our mobile clients, too, and it saves us a lot of time getting code shipped quickly.

We have a Mojave VM configured with Xcode, Fastlane, and the gitlab runner.

We automate uploads to Appetize.io for every feature branch so that QA and clients can test out new features in a simulator running in the browser.

We automate builds and uploads to Apple test flight and Google playstore alpha tracks on our develop branch.

The gitlab runner is by far the most reliable and easiest to setup part of the whole deal with the worst being maybe cocoapods or npm for the projects that rely on them (react-native).

I'll ping you on gitlab. Happy to go into more detail!

Re: Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO

#142

Post by Ajedi32 » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 3:49 PM UTC

petercooper wrote: post #82

Does anyone know why GitLab hasn't taken off so much amongst open source projects? I have no horse in the race (indeed, I'd love for there to be more variety in this space) but one of my jobs is to link to open source repos and I've just checked.. and the last one I linked to was in December 2018. In the niches I cover, almost no-one seems to actually using GitLab for their open source repos. Lest you think it's just…

It's the network effect. GitHub was first-to-market. Almost all open source contributors have a GitHub account these days. Many older projects started there long before GitLab was a viable competitor.

Now assume you're starting a new open source project. Most of the other open source projects you've seen are hosted on GitHub. Most of the other developers you interact with have GitHub accounts. GitLab has all the same features and is slowly growing, but still isn't nearly as popular as GitHub is. Which platform do you choose for hosting your project?

GitLab is certainly a worthy competitor, but unless there arises a strongly compelling reason to switch I can't really see it overcoming that barrier and becoming the new de-facto standard for open source projects for quite some time.

Re: Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO

#143

Post by mstade » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 3:50 PM UTC

pm90 wrote: post #37

Kudos to the team. While my current workspace is tied to GitHub, I will most certainly switch to Gitlab given the option to. Why? Only one reason: GitHub support is fucking horrible. It’s insanely bad, even for paying enterprise customers. Open a support ticket, you will get some superficial pointers to documentation, and then be completely ignored. Their Product team is the absolute worst too. There are so many thin…

That's interesting, my experience with GH support is the polar opposite – they've been stellar. Particularly their enterprise support went above and beyond when we had issues and never did I feel I got either a canned response or even had to wait particularly long to receive an answer. At one point we had an issue with a flaky load balancer sometimes dropping connections, but the folks maintaining the load balancer were adamant that it was a fault with GHE. Even though I was certain it was the load balancer, I reached out to GH for support and they not only responded with helpful tips to determine whether the GHE instance had a problem, but also helped me build my case that it was in fact the load balancer that was at fault. Turns out the issue was a broken NIC on the load balancer, and GH support were instrumental in helping us figure this out, even though a perfectly acceptable response from them would've been "not our product – good luck; have fun" or something to that effect.

Really surprised to hear about your experience with their support, mine's really been nothing but positive. To be fair, I haven't interacted with them for well over a year now since I'm no longer involved in maintaining GHE. Did support take a hit after the Microsoft takeover?

Re: Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO

#144

Post by emilycook » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 3:52 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #110

emilycook wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! GitLab employee, our plan is to go public by 2020 [1][2]. I trust Sid our CEO to stay transparent about this (worked with him personally, this isn't just blind company loyalty lol), and he does a company-wide AMA very frequently where he talks about going public. So I think we will stay independent, or at least won't get acquired easily. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/being-a-public-company/ [2] https://ab…

Hi Emily, I've been following the Gitlab saga from reasonably close by (I'm Dutch), if and when you go public you can count on me buying a substantial number of shares just to put my Euros where my mouth is. Best of luck to all of you.

Yay! Glad to hear that :)

Re: Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO

#145

Post by btasovac » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 3:53 PM UTC

toupeira wrote: post #122

petercooper wrote: post #82

Does anyone know why GitLab hasn't taken off so much amongst open source projects? I have no horse in the race (indeed, I'd love for there to be more variety in this space) but one of my jobs is to link to open source repos and I've just checked.. and the last one I linked to was in December 2018. In the niches I cover, almost no-one seems to actually using GitLab for their open source repos. Lest you think it's just…

There are some high-profile FOSS projects using GitLab, but they're not as visible as they would be on GitHub because they host their own instances: - https://gitlab.gnome.org/ - https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/ - https://salsa.debian.org/ (AFAIK this is an ongoing migration) Others are considering a migration: - KDE: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/24900 - GNU Emacs: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/i…

The Debian migration is actually finished.

Re: Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO

#146

Post by COMMENT___ » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 3:54 PM UTC

dsumenkovic wrote: post #102

COMMENT___ wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please tell more about your experience with GitLab vs GitHub support team? What kind of problems did they help (or did not help) solve?

Hi! GitLab employee here. While someone else from the community provides the feedback, I'd like to highlight what our support team can provide. > GitLab offers a variety of support options for all customers and users on both paid and free tiers. You should be able to find help using the resources linked below, regardless of how you use GitLab. https://about.gitlab.com/support/

I do not understand your comment and - frankly speaking - it looks like this is a canned response made by a bot.

Please highlight why and how GitLab support team is better than X with some examples. I really want to learn about real cases.

Re: Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO

#147

Post by scient » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 3:56 PM UTC

aeonflux wrote: post #45

pm90 wrote: post #37

Kudos to the team. While my current workspace is tied to GitHub, I will most certainly switch to Gitlab given the option to. Why? Only one reason: GitHub support is fucking horrible. It’s insanely bad, even for paying enterprise customers. Open a support ticket, you will get some superficial pointers to documentation, and then be completely ignored. Their Product team is the absolute worst too. There are so many thin…

I can totally relate to that. In flood of notifications I missed information about expiring CC. Instead of somehow soft-locking the account they just downgraded it and all my integrations, hooks and god knows what just blowed. I managed to fix the CC in 5 minutes, but many months after I am still recovering from that disaster. Support replied that they did send warning so I should just FO.

So you are blaming them for your own fault?

Re: Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO

#148

Post by tikkabhuna » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 4:01 PM UTC

toupeira wrote: post #129

tikkabhuna wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search in general in Gitlab is painful. Searches seem to require 3 or more characters, but if you put two you just don't see any results. No warning saying add more. Pretty intuitive. The file name search is pretty rapid though.

We have an ongoing project to enable Elasticsearch on gitlab.com, which will greatly improve this: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/153 There's also a dedicated Search team being built at the moment to focus just on this.

That's good to know, thanks!

Gitlab is one of the few products where I look forward to each release. You guys are doing a great job at keeping interest high and your communication is great.

Re: Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO

#149

Post by gnud » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 4:03 PM UTC

scient wrote: post #147

aeonflux wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can totally relate to that. In flood of notifications I missed information about expiring CC. Instead of somehow soft-locking the account they just downgraded it and all my integrations, hooks and god knows what just blowed. I managed to fix the CC in 5 minutes, but many months after I am still recovering from that disaster. Support replied that they did send warning so I should just FO.

So you are blaming them for your own fault?

Pretty sure he's blaming them for deleting all his configurations, not for disabling them once the CC bounced.

And I agree. If that happened to me, I would move, without a doubt.

Re: Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO

#150

Post by ltbarcly3 » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 4:08 PM UTC

I just want to address 'valuation' quickly for people who may not be familiar with how this is made up.

Lets say I have a peanut cart, and in my sack I have 10,000 peanuts. Some sucker comes along and invests in the peanut cart, and I sell him 1 peanut's worth of the cart for $1.00. By the usual rules of 'valuation', the valuation of my sack of peanuts is now $10,000.00.

Valuation just means what someone somewhere estimates the value to be, it doesn't have to be credible. It becomes more significant when investments are made, since if an investor puts in money at a valuation of X, they are betting that the company will find liquidity at some point in the future with a valuation greater than X, or the investor will lose money (even this is not true, since they will likely have liquidation preference or other backstops to protect themselves at the expense of founders and employees).

The short version is, valuation is not what the company is actually worth, or even an impartial estimate or appraisal. It is purely the amount invested divided by the fraction of the company that investment purchased (even if the fraction is small), and it ignores things like liquidation preference that let investors hedge risk when they invest money at valuations that make no sense.