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Gitlab S-1

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191–200 of 295 posts

Re: Gitlab S-1

#191
post #4

Congrats Sytse.

18.9% shares, not bad. Had a chat with him a few year ago at the gitlab booth at Fosdem.

Somewhere around 2014 Sytse asked my former coworker to become gitlab’s first employee, working on Ruby code. Completely understand the request, as he’s an excellent DevOps engineer and fine colleague. He declined to opt for a more secure job position ....

Re: Gitlab S-1

#192

Gitlab is one of the pioneers of "remote-first" [0] and "building in public" [1], to the extent of sometimes even live-streaming CEO meetings [2] and sales pitches [3] Gitlab, I believe, informs the common strategy behind most other source-available ycombinator enterprise startups: the buyer-based open-core model [4] Congratulations Gitlab. You're far from a copycat and deserve all the success for relentless executio…

Yeah I absolutely support Gitlab and love seeing new projects use Gitlab over Github. But to be fair, they have a massive backlog of issues to fix. Basic issues too, like variables not expanding correctly in CI jobs, or Google not being able to index projects on gitlab.com unless there's another page already linking to it. I've been using Gitlab.com and Gitlab on-prem since 2013 and over the years I've found many of…

No notifications on the platform is a deal breaker for me.

Re: Gitlab S-1

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I absolutely support Gitlab and love seeing new projects use Gitlab over Github. But to be fair, they have a massive backlog of issues to fix. Basic issues too, like variables not expanding correctly in CI jobs, or Google not being able to index projects on gitlab.com unless there's another page already linking to it. I've been using Gitlab.com and Gitlab on-prem since 2013 and over the years I've found many of…

No notifications on the platform is a deal breaker for me.

Do you mean no push notifications? Because I get emails for stuff. The rest is integrated into our chat client, mattermost. I actually prefer using that as a centralized place for work notifications.

Re: Gitlab S-1

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MongoDB and Twilio have both done reasonably well haven't they? Which developer tools have not done well?

twilio is not a developer tool. twilio is a communications company that has great developer outreach

Twilio’s product is an API.

The end-user of (most of) their products are developers.

Re: Gitlab S-1

#195
post #166

I'm grateful to GitLab for providing an alternative to GitHub, and an open source one. It's an open core product with the community edition providing a lot of value. Here are some community hosted instances: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/List_of_Community-Hosted_GitL... The CI system is quite powerful, and Travis CI's struggles before and after acquisition has shown that it's hard to host a major CI platform. I hope…

I really wanted to like gitlab, but have had so many reliability issues. The UI thinking the source branch doesn’t exist, CI jobs not running for hours etc.

Haha that UI branch name thing is hilarious. Everyone at work has the same problem and has had it for the year and a half we have been using gitlab but the gitlab devs insist it doesn't happen for them.

You can workaround it by pressing the right arrow at the end of the text.

Re: Gitlab S-1

#196
post #36

I realize plenty of tech companies IPO and aren’t profitable. But it seems scary to be losing more money than what you generated in total revenues. REVENUE: 2021: $152m (loss of $192m) 2020: $81m (loss of $130m) EDIT: reworded for clarity.

Here's a good analysis of the financials in the S1: https://cloudedjudgement.substack.com/p/gitlab-benchmarking-...

Re: Gitlab S-1

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Gitlab has been leading the way for a while now, consistently introducing new features that Github eventually copies. It's a real testament to the power of competition. I first started using Gitlab due to free private repositories, which Github eventually added. Gitlab had free built-in CI/CD first, and Github eventually followed. I'm still on Gitlab these days despite Github catching up, and still enjoying feat…

In addition to the above, GitLab Pages continues to be easier to setup and use (on GitLab.com) than GitHub Pages.

GitLab pages started with the incredible idea that you could provide your own docker container and use the CI to build using whatever tools you want while github only supported jekyl at the time.

Re: Gitlab S-1

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half sarcastic, half serious? I think the prevailing theory is that yes these companies are spending tons of money to get a little bit of money, but it's a one time per customer expense and that customer will still be there for many more quarters, paying monthly dues.

The theory is lot stronger/valid in enterprise sales like gitlab, customers take a lot of time to switch even if they are not satisfied with a product, there may not viable competitior with bespoke solution the same your current provider gives you etc It is far less true for consumer/SMB mid market products as cost of leaving there is not high.

A lot of that money gets spent on adding features to win sales and those features are a one time cost so they can be used for free to win new customers later. GitLab pushes hard to be the do everything tool.

Re: Gitlab S-1

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No? The point is just that revenue for subscription models recurs whereas build cost does not (handwave).

Yes? There are operational costs involved as well. It's not like a company fires half of their team after the product is launched.

> It's not like a company fires half of their team after the product is launched.

Not an uncommon VC/PE strategy. Wait two years and see what happens.

Re: Gitlab S-1

#200
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is actually quite surprising to me given what their product is...

this is what I was thinking. I installed a gitlab instance on an old laptop for a friend and myself to use to collaborate on a couple small projects a few years back. I haven't checked in to see what gitlab offers today but I'm having a mental disconnect between all those millions of dollars and what my understanding of the product is. there must be something the product offers that I'm ignorant to that justifies all…

GitLab is not just a git hosting and collaboration tool. They want it to be the single tool you use for almost everything to do with an application including monitoring, controlling infrastructure, error logging, project management/planning, security auditing, and a bunch of other things.

If you are using GitLab in a hobbyist or solo way, you are touching about 5% of the features that GitLab provides. Which is fine and a valid way to use it but its easy to see how customers justify spending big dollars on the top plan with hundreds of user licenses when the tool does so much. We even have customer support and project managers using the tool because it caters to them well.

If you want you can even use gitlab to replace something like zendesk as it provides an email address which puts all emails in to a "support desk" queue.

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