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Gitlab from YC to IPO

blog.ycombinator.com

81–90 of 258 posts

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ORCL, MSFT, SalesForce and a few others would pay 10B+ to own those relationships and control of the future of the product

If they were paying more than an IPO value they probably would buy already ...

Gitlab doesn't want to sell

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#82
post #31
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub has stronger 'social' features and it's better for people who want to connect to other devs or build portfolios. GitLab is years ahead of GitHub for certain stuff (e.g. CI/CD) and IMO it has a better commercial offering for business. I use GitHub as my portfolio profile for free and GitLab in my $JOB. That's my opinion tho, I'm just a person who uses both.

GitHub's CI pipelines are behind GitLab? My lord, here I was thinking about moving to GitHub Enterprise when our subscription expires because everything in GitLab feels like an unfinished weekend project. Seems like nobody can get anywhere near the functionality of Jenkins.

Seriously, they're miles behind. It doesn't even really support Kubernetes, you have to have long running 'runner' servers ala Jenkins and you need to have all your build tools installed on those. It's miserable, fragile and I've dearly, dearly missed gitlab CI the last few times I've had to go anywhere near actions.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#83
post #49

I used to work at Uber's Amsterdam office at a time where the remote nature of the office (from SF HQ) was a struggle for some teams because of strong dependencies on teams located at SF HQ. Sid came to the office and talked to us about some strategies Gitlab used for remote work, timezone differences etc. Not only the talk was very helpful, Sid was an incredibly clear communicator, calm and humble. He really seemed…

For those who want to know more about Gitlab and its all remote approach (a lot of posts): https://about.gitlab.com/blog/tags.html#remote-work And their handbook: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/

We used this as a template the year before the pandemic to get our mostly remote teams working well. Once the pandemic hit, there were few issues we had to address.

I very much appreciate them making that public.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#84
post #40
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub's CI pipelines are behind GitLab? My lord, here I was thinking about moving to GitHub Enterprise when our subscription expires because everything in GitLab feels like an unfinished weekend project. Seems like nobody can get anywhere near the functionality of Jenkins.

> Seems like nobody can get anywhere near the functionality of Jenkins. I've heard Jenkins is a nightmare to administer (not sure about the new versions). Seems like an opportunity: the power of Jenkins with modern sensibility.

Jenkins is a nightmare because everyone decided to spend months customising it with groovy and it became overly specific to your team/dept. The servers themselves are quite simple (single .jar, etc). These days we have containers, and it's made CI a much better thing.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#85
post #41
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub's CI pipelines are behind GitLab? My lord, here I was thinking about moving to GitHub Enterprise when our subscription expires because everything in GitLab feels like an unfinished weekend project. Seems like nobody can get anywhere near the functionality of Jenkins.

And here I am planning on replacing Jenkins with GitLab CI.. do you really think Jenkins is better? Do you have any examples or thoughts you can share?

Your plan is solid (source: building ci stuff for >10 years). I wouldn't really suggest much else, although argo is getting pretty good if you're deploying to k8s, I'd still keep gitlab around for creating your images.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#86
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who want to know more about Gitlab and its all remote approach (a lot of posts): https://about.gitlab.com/blog/tags.html#remote-work And their handbook: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/

We used this as a template the year before the pandemic to get our mostly remote teams working well. Once the pandemic hit, there were few issues we had to address. I very much appreciate them making that public.

Yep, that wiki is amazing.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#87
post #8

A paid user + big fan of gitlab. They exist in a strange valley between github and Atlassian where usability has remained high while also being featureful. Their kanban is 10% more functional than Trello, which is all our small team really needs, they give you everything and they don't nickel and dime you. The only feature I would like to see improved is their PR process. Seems a bit buggy with remotely large changes…

The only issue I had with GL is that they don't show the entire diff if the changes/files are very large. They may have fixed this since last year, but it was super, super annoying to me at the time.

Their search functionality is also... non functioning. Github's search is dramatically more powerful.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#88
post #80

I'll admit that I was wrong about GitLab. I had the chance to invest in them way back in the day, and passed. My thought at the time was that no open source company had ever been super successful except RedHat, which was more of an outlier than a pattern. And my other thought was that they are competing against GitHub, which was extremely popular and well funded. I honestly didn't think they stood a chance. I'm happy…

Is Gitlab 100% open source?

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they? What's the Gitlab market share? Also, it sounds to me like Github is leaving the old lunch of "Git hosting + issue tracking" on the table, and moving on to being a kind of web-based all-in-one full-service collaboration/dev platform with a social network built in. So even if Gitlab picks up some single-digit-percentage market share, that's not what Github cares about anyway.

> a kind of web-based all-in-one full-service collaboration/dev platform with a social network built in. Why would I want a social network built into my version control & ci/cd pipeline (I assume you're referring to the "stars" feature, and not about issue reporting). Maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but I'm sort of sick of everything becoming a social network. I neither have nor do I want internet clout, and all social…

In OpenSource space there is a small value: If I get a contribution from a stranger and I see they are respected contributor to trustworthy other organisations I can derive some trust from that. (Doesn't mean handing out access and blindly merging, but helps to judge)

Also for people looking for jobs it can be a tool for self promotion.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#90
post #56

Congrats to the team and I'm very thankful that there are alternatives to GitHub out there. Not that I don't like GitHub (I do) or use GitHub (every day), but lately it seems like they are sherlocking a whole lot of ideas from the OSS "marketplace" into their main product. That kind of irks me. If GitLab were able to add something like GitHub Actions into their platform I would leave GH in a second.

For anyone else that needs it:

The phenomenon of Apple releasing a feature that supplants or obviates third-party software is so well known that being Sherlocked has become an accepted term used within the Mac and iOS developer community.

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