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Gitlab from YC to IPO

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#111

Post by easton »

cyberpunk wrote: post #82
vultour wrote: 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.

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.

It’s probably because Actions is a fork of Azure Pipelines, which was originally designed to coordinate runners on Windows (where containers aren’t nearly as flexible or compatible as they are on Linux). Microsoft came up with some fancy internal magic to have hot pools of ephemeral VMs ready to assign in seconds, which nobody outside can really replicate (I don’t think), and then everyone sits in sadness while they try to debug why their tests run fine on “runner-1” but not on “runner-2”.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#112

Post by lnxg33k1 »

I guess after GitHub and gitlab i will have to find an alternative, so long and thanks for all the fish, I'm not really sure why we need to pursue growth at all cost, a perpetual hunt for currency on daily basis, of a number we will never be able to spend

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#113

Post by mikepurvis »

cyberpunk wrote: post #84
mooreds wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I agree with this. The quality of your Jenkins experience will be pretty much inversely proportional to how much groovy script is in your Jenkinsfiles.

Every new permutation of parameters is a new chance for something to go wrong, and there's basically no sane way to unit test or validate any of your "helper" functions, so they're all write-once-change-never.

Which is not necessarily a problem inherent in Jenkins— Jenkins just gives you more than enough rope to hang yourself. GitLab CI can get silly too, but culturally it inherits from the much simpler Travis model, where you're basically expected to just be wrapping some other build tool (eg, tox from the Python world) rather than rolling the whole thing yourself.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#115

Post by nodesocket »

jedberg wrote: 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…

I’ll echo a sentiment I also had but perhaps I was wrong. I believed that users of GitLab used GitLab because they didn’t want to pay a premium (or pay at all) for GitHub; thus I viewed it as a cheaper alternative in the same vein as buying a Hyundai vs buying a Mercedes. I assumed only frugal “developers” were using it, and surely any legit companies would opt for the superior GitHub.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#116

Post by specialist »

jedberg wrote: 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…

Any takeaway lessons for evaluating future FOSS startups? Like maybe place higher weight on rate of adding new users?

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#117

Post by specialist »

mooreds wrote: post #40
vultour wrote: 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 (and the like) are build script obfuscation frameworks.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#118

Post by alohaandmahalo »

Copenjin wrote: post #86
e40 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Darren here from GitLab — warms my heart to hear that our remote guides are being used and making lives/companies better. Thank you!

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#120

Post by nabakin »

atonse wrote: post #47

"Gitlab CEO here, getting rich and feeling proud" [1] ;-) – congrats to the Sid, Dmitriy, and the rest of the Gitlab team. Always appreciated your presence on HN. We've been GitLab customers for 2-3 years now (what was attractive was having "everything in one SaaS subscription") and it's worked out quite well. There's always papercuts for sure and the product could always use more polish, but overall it has been nice…

When I click on your link to find the quote, it doesn't show up. Strange. Or are you playing off of the joke?
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