6 ms·

GitLab 9.1 Released with Service Desk, Canary Deployments, and Burndown Charts

86 points by doubleg 9y ago

0x0 9y ago
This page crashes a lot on iOS!
- jobvandervoort 9y ago
  Apologies. I'm pushing an update that should significantly reduce image size.
  - sytse 9y ago
    We pushed multiple updates, in the end we decided to use static images instead of gifs https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/5764/diffs https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...
- mrmondo 9y ago
  Just FYI - I can't make it crash Safari on iOS 10.3.2 (latest beta)
- jakecodes 9y ago
  This should be fixed.
bobsam 9y ago
For the love of God, add some social functions to gitlab and bitbucket!! And get people to use them! A recruiter just toss out my application to my dream job since other applicants had "more stars on their git".
- orf 9y ago
  Then that recruiter is utterly worthless and you should contact the tech lead a at the companyuestion and let them know.
  - bobsam 9y ago
    The recruiter was an in-house employee. This was her only job. And the company is not your average IT sweatshop (big very sucessful company, names starts with an A).
    - orf 9y ago
      It doesn't matter, you should still contact someone technical about it, especially if she actualy said "more stars on their git". Put that quote in your message! They might be glad to know she's filtering candidates based on that, because they can talk to her about it. It could lead to you getting an interview. What's the worst that could happen?
    - cthalupa 9y ago
      Having worked at very big successful companies and being heavily involved in the hiring process: We know recruiters don't always get it right. We need them, because creating and maintaining hiring pipelines is a full-time job, but we know (and the recruiters should also know!) that they're working on a best-understanding of the job they're recruiting for, and that best-understanding is not a complete understanding, since they don't do that job. It might have been a miss on their understanding of an explanation, it might have been a miss on whoever communicated the job requirements to them. But if you have a contact outside of the recruiter, you should 100% reach out.
- stonogo 9y ago
  Sure, don't treat the symptom, just demand everyone contract the disease.
  - harperlee 9y ago
    ...or perhaps let's take care of the patients while we develop a cure? If it is a fact that recruiters look at github presence, ignoring that fact is harmful for people only sharing work on gitlab, which in turn hurts gitlab.
    - Sir_Substance 9y ago
      Much like the value of the US dollar, what you're saying is only real if enough people choose to believe it. Buying into and supporting this behavior is just digging an increasingly deep hole. If you don't want github commits (and an agreement to the github terms of use) to be a mandatory part of all developers lives and CVs, then simply continue being an excellent developer without making github commits that you don't want to make. We're in an important stage of github adoption at the moment. Some recruiters think it's a critical signaling mechanism. If we buy into that, they will seem to be correct, and the companies they recruit for will allow them to continue with their methodology. Soon, they will become correct because all career-oriented developers will feel compelled to work on github based open source projects to the exclusion of other open source projects, even if they don't actually give a shit about the projects they are working on. However, if the companies they recruit for see high quality developers going to the competition because their recruiters are dismissing people out of hand for not being on github, those companies will eventually tell their recruiters to pull their fingers out and do some proper legwork. The correct approach is to starve out this behavior while the cost of doing so is relatively low, not buy into it.
      - CharlesW 9y ago
        > The correct approach is to starve out this behavior while the cost of doing so is relatively low... The cost is pretty high to bobsam, who didn't have a chance to interview for his dream job. Not "playing the game" only works if all good developers stop using GitHub, no?
- Sir_Substance 9y ago
  Oh Jesus, please don't fill my professional tool with social gunk. What is this, a highschool? As a side note, recruiters are not on your side, they're on their own side. Don't rely on them for anything, least of all securing your dream job.
  - dominotw 9y ago
    Its not gunk. Stars is the first thing I check for social proof before using a project in my work. Higher stars is almost a guarantee of better quality and momentum.
    - scrollaway 9y ago
      Higher star count is a guarantee of more visibility, that doesn't mean anything quality-wise and it doesn't mean much momentum-wise.
      - dominotw 9y ago
        Curious if have any examples to back up your point? I've never seen a project with high start and low momentum, I don't mean dead projects ,obviously.
        Sir_Substance 9y ago
        >I've never seen a project with high start and low momentum, I don't mean dead projects ,obviously. "I've never seen this thing, except in this obvious and common case where it happens all the time, but other than that, literally never". Mate :/ In general, my first step in deciding whether projects are good is to google "<project name> review", and see what other developers and sysadmins have experienced with it. I have often found that a 5 stars system contains inadequate information density to provide me with guidance on the suitability of one project over another with respect to integrating it into my companies tech stack, although I appreciate that's a personal standpoint and that you may disagree.
        stonogo 9y ago
- dominotw 9y ago
  Can you tell us which company this is. I have lots of stars and i am looking for a job.
- mrmondo 9y ago
  Have you actually logged a feature request for this? *Edit: Thanks for the downvote, but seriously - have you? If you haven't - It's more constructive to do that so civilised production direction and development discussion may take place in the official centralised forum rather than having outbursts on HN.
- sytse 9y ago
  What feature would you like to see first?
  - bobsam 9y ago
    The ability to find popular devs and popular projects. Also a way to find similar projects or projects about an specific topic. Maybe some of these are already implemented and we mostly need to get the devs to use them more frequently?
- elmerland 9y ago
  If I were interviewing you I would care a lot more about the job you were hired to do than about any side-projects that are not part of your job. I'm not a fan of recruiters incentivizing "required" side-work. That's the time you dedicate to all other important things in your life (which could be a side project, but it is not in most cases)
  - bobsam 9y ago
    The were two posts on Reddit about placing fakes ad for a job to see how the competition was. They were both blown away with the quality of the applications, in particular people working on a lot of important side projects. I can only assume recruiters very much consider this when they don't know anything else about you.
    - tpetry 9y ago
      Do you still have the reddit articles? Sounds interesting.
    - elmerland 9y ago
      All things being equal if all you know is their side projects that makes sense. Normally you would have their resume which includes work done at their job. I get how it's so tempting to look at people's side projects as a measure of proficiency. I just don't think it's fair to judge people by their ability to spend hours working outside of work.
- j_s 9y ago
  A public indication of the popularity of each project is a great way to winnow down the number of valid options. They could whip something together just from their server-side analytics so it was more honest rather than a popularity contest.
salex89 9y ago
I love Gitlab. One day I expect them to effortlessly make an OS with an IDE preinstalled with plugins for each a and every languages, which integrates with Gitlab and Twitch to stream your work. For free...
- sytse 9y ago
  One of the idea's for a preinstalled IDE is described in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/22876 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/22876 which so far planned to be part of GitLab CE (free). No plans for streaming though.
noarchy 9y ago
Burndown charts, really? Fine, but that seems like a bit of feature creep to have features for manager-types in what I've always seen, overall, as a dev tool.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Latty 9y ago
  Those manager-types are the ones that tend to get a final say on what the devs use (rightly or wrongly), and if they feel they need those features, they are going to want to use a different tool.
- purerandomness 9y ago
  It's in the Enterprise Edition only, where it belongs.
- sdesol 9y ago
  I don't think people fully realize how truly difficult it is produce next generation dev tools. What GitLab is doing makes perfect business sense, since it's an order of a magnitude easier to create business focused solutions, compared to dev related solutions. Creating next generation issue trackers, search, build solutions, etc. requires significant R&D and I really don't think GitLab is focused on this type of skunk work. I personally think Microsoft has the best chance to disrupt the software development lifecycle in the future, due to their R&D budget and talent pool. GitLab in a lot of ways, is sitting in a perfect business position. All they have to do is look at what Atlassian, Microsoft, GitHub, etc. are doing and copy what can be copied. There really is no shame in this, as this only makes business sense. Git has created an opening into the software development market that has never existed before. In the past, you had to spend a lot of time and money to create a version control system, which you could use as a beachhead for Enterprise sales. However with Git, you no longer require significant time and money to compete. With Git, the really hard stuff is being worked on for free, by some of the smartest people around the world. And because of that, you can focus on solving the not so difficult problems, but still problems people would pay for. Git has created a massive opening for who can compete in Enterprise, but as the easier problems get solved and turn into commodity features; focus should shift again, to the not so easy problems. If GitLab invests properly, they should be able to compete in the long run with Microsoft and others. The challenge I guess, is knowing when to start focusing on the harder problems.
themihai 9y ago
I may be wrong but to me it seems they take on Atlassian. It looks quite similar with JIRA Service Desk and Agile(Burndown Charts)
- sytse 9y ago
  We did look at both of these before designing these features. Burndown charts are common, service desk functionality less so. We look forward to replacing our use of Zendesk with this.
markdog12 9y ago
Favicon turning into runner progress indicator is a nice touch. Useful when you have lots of tabs open.
- sytse 9y ago
  Glad to hear you like it. We'll keep the UX polish coming.

86 points by doubleg 9y ago

0x0 9y ago

This page crashes a lot on iOS!

jobvandervoort 9y ago
Apologies. I'm pushing an update that should significantly reduce image size.
- sytse 9y ago
  We pushed multiple updates, in the end we decided to use static images instead of gifs https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/5764/diffs https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...
mrmondo 9y ago
Just FYI - I can't make it crash Safari on iOS 10.3.2 (latest beta)
jakecodes 9y ago
This should be fixed.

bobsam 9y ago

For the love of God, add some social functions to gitlab and bitbucket!! And get people to use them! A recruiter just toss out my application to my dream job since other applicants had "more stars on their git".

orf 9y ago
Then that recruiter is utterly worthless and you should contact the tech lead a at the companyuestion and let them know.
- bobsam 9y ago
  The recruiter was an in-house employee. This was her only job. And the company is not your average IT sweatshop (big very sucessful company, names starts with an A).
  - orf 9y ago
    It doesn't matter, you should still contact someone technical about it, especially if she actualy said "more stars on their git". Put that quote in your message! They might be glad to know she's filtering candidates based on that, because they can talk to her about it. It could lead to you getting an interview. What's the worst that could happen?
  - cthalupa 9y ago
    Having worked at very big successful companies and being heavily involved in the hiring process: We know recruiters don't always get it right. We need them, because creating and maintaining hiring pipelines is a full-time job, but we know (and the recruiters should also know!) that they're working on a best-understanding of the job they're recruiting for, and that best-understanding is not a complete understanding, since they don't do that job. It might have been a miss on their understanding of an explanation, it might have been a miss on whoever communicated the job requirements to them. But if you have a contact outside of the recruiter, you should 100% reach out.
stonogo 9y ago
Sure, don't treat the symptom, just demand everyone contract the disease.
- harperlee 9y ago
  ...or perhaps let's take care of the patients while we develop a cure? If it is a fact that recruiters look at github presence, ignoring that fact is harmful for people only sharing work on gitlab, which in turn hurts gitlab.
  - Sir_Substance 9y ago
    Much like the value of the US dollar, what you're saying is only real if enough people choose to believe it. Buying into and supporting this behavior is just digging an increasingly deep hole. If you don't want github commits (and an agreement to the github terms of use) to be a mandatory part of all developers lives and CVs, then simply continue being an excellent developer without making github commits that you don't want to make. We're in an important stage of github adoption at the moment. Some recruiters think it's a critical signaling mechanism. If we buy into that, they will seem to be correct, and the companies they recruit for will allow them to continue with their methodology. Soon, they will become correct because all career-oriented developers will feel compelled to work on github based open source projects to the exclusion of other open source projects, even if they don't actually give a shit about the projects they are working on. However, if the companies they recruit for see high quality developers going to the competition because their recruiters are dismissing people out of hand for not being on github, those companies will eventually tell their recruiters to pull their fingers out and do some proper legwork. The correct approach is to starve out this behavior while the cost of doing so is relatively low, not buy into it.
    - CharlesW 9y ago
      > The correct approach is to starve out this behavior while the cost of doing so is relatively low... The cost is pretty high to bobsam, who didn't have a chance to interview for his dream job. Not "playing the game" only works if all good developers stop using GitHub, no?
Sir_Substance 9y ago
Oh Jesus, please don't fill my professional tool with social gunk. What is this, a highschool? As a side note, recruiters are not on your side, they're on their own side. Don't rely on them for anything, least of all securing your dream job.
- dominotw 9y ago
  Its not gunk. Stars is the first thing I check for social proof before using a project in my work. Higher stars is almost a guarantee of better quality and momentum.
  - scrollaway 9y ago
    Higher star count is a guarantee of more visibility, that doesn't mean anything quality-wise and it doesn't mean much momentum-wise.
    - dominotw 9y ago
      Curious if have any examples to back up your point? I've never seen a project with high start and low momentum, I don't mean dead projects ,obviously.
      - Sir_Substance 9y ago
        >I've never seen a project with high start and low momentum, I don't mean dead projects ,obviously. "I've never seen this thing, except in this obvious and common case where it happens all the time, but other than that, literally never". Mate :/ In general, my first step in deciding whether projects are good is to google "<project name> review", and see what other developers and sysadmins have experienced with it. I have often found that a 5 stars system contains inadequate information density to provide me with guidance on the suitability of one project over another with respect to integrating it into my companies tech stack, although I appreciate that's a personal standpoint and that you may disagree.
      - stonogo 9y ago
dominotw 9y ago
Can you tell us which company this is. I have lots of stars and i am looking for a job.
mrmondo 9y ago
Have you actually logged a feature request for this? *Edit: Thanks for the downvote, but seriously - have you? If you haven't - It's more constructive to do that so civilised production direction and development discussion may take place in the official centralised forum rather than having outbursts on HN.
sytse 9y ago
What feature would you like to see first?
- bobsam 9y ago
  The ability to find popular devs and popular projects. Also a way to find similar projects or projects about an specific topic. Maybe some of these are already implemented and we mostly need to get the devs to use them more frequently?
elmerland 9y ago
If I were interviewing you I would care a lot more about the job you were hired to do than about any side-projects that are not part of your job. I'm not a fan of recruiters incentivizing "required" side-work. That's the time you dedicate to all other important things in your life (which could be a side project, but it is not in most cases)
- bobsam 9y ago
  The were two posts on Reddit about placing fakes ad for a job to see how the competition was. They were both blown away with the quality of the applications, in particular people working on a lot of important side projects. I can only assume recruiters very much consider this when they don't know anything else about you.
  - tpetry 9y ago
    Do you still have the reddit articles? Sounds interesting.
  - elmerland 9y ago
    All things being equal if all you know is their side projects that makes sense. Normally you would have their resume which includes work done at their job. I get how it's so tempting to look at people's side projects as a measure of proficiency. I just don't think it's fair to judge people by their ability to spend hours working outside of work.
j_s 9y ago
A public indication of the popularity of each project is a great way to winnow down the number of valid options. They could whip something together just from their server-side analytics so it was more honest rather than a popularity contest.

salex89 9y ago

I love Gitlab. One day I expect them to effortlessly make an OS with an IDE preinstalled with plugins for each a and every languages, which integrates with Gitlab and Twitch to stream your work. For free...

sytse 9y ago
One of the idea's for a preinstalled IDE is described in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/22876 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/22876 which so far planned to be part of GitLab CE (free). No plans for streaming though.

noarchy 9y ago

Burndown charts, really? Fine, but that seems like a bit of feature creep to have features for manager-types in what I've always seen, overall, as a dev tool.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Latty 9y ago
Those manager-types are the ones that tend to get a final say on what the devs use (rightly or wrongly), and if they feel they need those features, they are going to want to use a different tool.
purerandomness 9y ago
It's in the Enterprise Edition only, where it belongs.
sdesol 9y ago
I don't think people fully realize how truly difficult it is produce next generation dev tools. What GitLab is doing makes perfect business sense, since it's an order of a magnitude easier to create business focused solutions, compared to dev related solutions. Creating next generation issue trackers, search, build solutions, etc. requires significant R&D and I really don't think GitLab is focused on this type of skunk work. I personally think Microsoft has the best chance to disrupt the software development lifecycle in the future, due to their R&D budget and talent pool. GitLab in a lot of ways, is sitting in a perfect business position. All they have to do is look at what Atlassian, Microsoft, GitHub, etc. are doing and copy what can be copied. There really is no shame in this, as this only makes business sense. Git has created an opening into the software development market that has never existed before. In the past, you had to spend a lot of time and money to create a version control system, which you could use as a beachhead for Enterprise sales. However with Git, you no longer require significant time and money to compete. With Git, the really hard stuff is being worked on for free, by some of the smartest people around the world. And because of that, you can focus on solving the not so difficult problems, but still problems people would pay for. Git has created a massive opening for who can compete in Enterprise, but as the easier problems get solved and turn into commodity features; focus should shift again, to the not so easy problems. If GitLab invests properly, they should be able to compete in the long run with Microsoft and others. The challenge I guess, is knowing when to start focusing on the harder problems.

themihai 9y ago

I may be wrong but to me it seems they take on Atlassian. It looks quite similar with JIRA Service Desk and Agile(Burndown Charts)

sytse 9y ago
We did look at both of these before designing these features. Burndown charts are common, service desk functionality less so. We look forward to replacing our use of Zendesk with this.

markdog12 9y ago

Favicon turning into runner progress indicator is a nice touch. Useful when you have lots of tabs open.

sytse 9y ago
Glad to hear you like it. We'll keep the UX polish coming.