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Take this with a grain of salt, perhaps I'm just not in a good headspace for reading this. The first two paragraphs of the first section (The next iteration of

Take this with a grain of salt, perhaps I'm just not in a good headspace for reading this. The first two paragraphs of the first section (The next iteration of Dev Ops) reads like it was written by someone at Gartner trying to get my 11 person business to buy a report for $50K that still won't actually tell me if the product will do the things I need it to. I imagine it's exciting for investors, but it made me sad and made me suddenly (and likely unfairly) scared that the features were going to take a back seat to the "placing strongly in several markets". That being said I read through the feature list and while none are specific things I needed it certainly sounds pretty great. We made the switch from github to gitlab about 4 years ago and I haven't really ran into any major issues or frustrations. So for what its worth after my comment above a BIG thank you to the Gitlab team.

john_cogs 5y ago
Thanks for the feedback. This is the first time we wrote a blog post about a release in addition to the release post we publish each month on the 22nd. (The release post for 14.0 can be found here: https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2021/06/22/gitlab-14-0-released/ https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2021/06/22/gitlab-14-0-rel...) We'll keep iterating to make these blog posts more appealing to the wider community in the future.
- peakaboo 5y ago
  What's your role at gitlab? Marketing? Because you don't understand what is being said here.
  - john_cogs 5y ago
    I lead the Developer Evangelism team at GitLab.
    - mercer 5y ago
      That explains a lot EDIT: to elaborate, I agree with other commenters that seem concerned with Gitlab's direction. It's hard to put my finger on what exactly bothers me, but to take a stab at it: Gitlab always seemed to pitch itself as the nerdy, more open little brother to Github. I'm currently on the free plan, but definitely consider/considered going for a paid plan. But this blog post plus the 'developer evangelist' give me pause and make me feel like Gitlab is aiming to just be a less well-funded Github. If you're going for the developers, it's best to avoid corpo-speak and the blog post and 'developer evangelism' is full of it.
      - john_cogs 5y ago
        :)
        mercer 5y ago
        My apologies for being a bit harsh. I know you're just doing your job.
        john_cogs 5y ago
        No problem at all. It was a good zinger.
      - peakaboo 5y ago
        Well said.
  - whoisjuan 5y ago
    So you think that because someone works on marketing or marketing related areas they’re technically illiterate? As a former Gitlab employee I can tell you that Gitlab has a lot of technically accomplished people doing marketing. People at Gitlab understand Gitlab because they eat their own dogfood. Everything at Gitlab is build using Gitlab including several marketing workflows.
    - emilsedgh 5y ago
      Maybe they are literate or illiterate but the post is so abstract it has become nonsense. The moment I saw this on HN, I visited the URL, to find _whats new_. Took me so many clicks to find the actual changes. They have a release notes and a blog post and a feature list. The first two ones could be written by AI as far as I'm concerned because you can read it and understand nothing. Third one [0], the actual list of changes, has always been crafted so well. [0] https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2021/06/22/gitlab-14-0-released/ https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2021/06/22/gitlab-14-0-rel...
- deusex_ 5y ago
  From a skim read of both blog posts it's still impossible to understand what's actually new in this version. Just introduce the features in the post, no?
  - john_cogs 5y ago
    If you check out the "Key features" section of the release post, you will find descriptions of all the new features in 14.0: https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2021/06/22/gitlab-14-0-released/#key-features https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2021/06/22/gitlab-14-0-rel...
  - 4d66ba06 5y ago
    I kept stopping at the MVP section (I'm on iOS) but if you keep scrolling you'll eventually get to "Key features released in GitLab 14.0"
- mercer 5y ago
  don't 'iterate' for 'appeal'. just have a passionate dev write shit and we'll eat it up!
- thayne 5y ago
  Ah, that's what I was looking for. Just a suggestion but maybe there should be a direct link to the release notice from the blog post?
  - john_cogs 5y ago
    Agreed. Thanks!
- kevinob11 5y ago
  Who was your target audience with the blog post?
duckmysick 5y ago
> like it was written by someone at Gartner trying to get my 11 person business to buy a report for $50K that still won't actually tell me if the product will do the things I need it to Does that actually happen? Especially the part where businesses are in the market for $50k reports that over-promise and under-deliver?
- kevinob11 5y ago
  Real thing that has happened to me, at the time my company (IT consulting / support) was ~10 people (we're ~25 now). A Gartner cold call that wanted to sell me a report that I could use to recommend which cloud storage vendor (box, dropbox, etc.) my clients should use. I explained that we were doing just fine by evaluating which one to used based on which features were more important to that specific client, but he seemed to think having the Gartner rec was critical. I said sure, then asked about the price, once I knew that I was clear that we weren't interested and thankfully he got the message and stopped calling. Maybe this is why my SMB IT company will never make the transition to enterprise clients. It gave me a pretty jaded view into how those types of reports work. It was hard to not think they are purchased to CYA (internal or external) when you end up recommending the wrong software. I hope that isn't always the case, maybe there is some great content in them, but at 50K I'll never know :)

john_cogs 5y ago

Thanks for the feedback. This is the first time we wrote a blog post about a release in addition to the release post we publish each month on the 22nd. (The release post for 14.0 can be found here: https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2021/06/22/gitlab-14-0-released/ https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2021/06/22/gitlab-14-0-rel...) We'll keep iterating to make these blog posts more appealing to the wider community in the future.

peakaboo 5y ago
What's your role at gitlab? Marketing? Because you don't understand what is being said here.
- john_cogs 5y ago
  I lead the Developer Evangelism team at GitLab.
  - mercer 5y ago
    That explains a lot EDIT: to elaborate, I agree with other commenters that seem concerned with Gitlab's direction. It's hard to put my finger on what exactly bothers me, but to take a stab at it: Gitlab always seemed to pitch itself as the nerdy, more open little brother to Github. I'm currently on the free plan, but definitely consider/considered going for a paid plan. But this blog post plus the 'developer evangelist' give me pause and make me feel like Gitlab is aiming to just be a less well-funded Github. If you're going for the developers, it's best to avoid corpo-speak and the blog post and 'developer evangelism' is full of it.
    - john_cogs 5y ago
      :)
      - mercer 5y ago
        My apologies for being a bit harsh. I know you're just doing your job.
        john_cogs 5y ago
        No problem at all. It was a good zinger.
    - peakaboo 5y ago
      Well said.
- whoisjuan 5y ago
  So you think that because someone works on marketing or marketing related areas they’re technically illiterate? As a former Gitlab employee I can tell you that Gitlab has a lot of technically accomplished people doing marketing. People at Gitlab understand Gitlab because they eat their own dogfood. Everything at Gitlab is build using Gitlab including several marketing workflows.
  - emilsedgh 5y ago
    Maybe they are literate or illiterate but the post is so abstract it has become nonsense. The moment I saw this on HN, I visited the URL, to find _whats new_. Took me so many clicks to find the actual changes. They have a release notes and a blog post and a feature list. The first two ones could be written by AI as far as I'm concerned because you can read it and understand nothing. Third one [0], the actual list of changes, has always been crafted so well. [0] https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2021/06/22/gitlab-14-0-released/ https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2021/06/22/gitlab-14-0-rel...
deusex_ 5y ago
From a skim read of both blog posts it's still impossible to understand what's actually new in this version. Just introduce the features in the post, no?
- john_cogs 5y ago
  If you check out the "Key features" section of the release post, you will find descriptions of all the new features in 14.0: https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2021/06/22/gitlab-14-0-released/#key-features https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2021/06/22/gitlab-14-0-rel...
- 4d66ba06 5y ago
  I kept stopping at the MVP section (I'm on iOS) but if you keep scrolling you'll eventually get to "Key features released in GitLab 14.0"
mercer 5y ago
don't 'iterate' for 'appeal'. just have a passionate dev write shit and we'll eat it up!
thayne 5y ago
Ah, that's what I was looking for. Just a suggestion but maybe there should be a direct link to the release notice from the blog post?
- john_cogs 5y ago
  Agreed. Thanks!
kevinob11 5y ago
Who was your target audience with the blog post?

duckmysick 5y ago

> like it was written by someone at Gartner trying to get my 11 person business to buy a report for $50K that still won't actually tell me if the product will do the things I need it to Does that actually happen? Especially the part where businesses are in the market for $50k reports that over-promise and under-deliver?

kevinob11 5y ago
Real thing that has happened to me, at the time my company (IT consulting / support) was ~10 people (we're ~25 now). A Gartner cold call that wanted to sell me a report that I could use to recommend which cloud storage vendor (box, dropbox, etc.) my clients should use. I explained that we were doing just fine by evaluating which one to used based on which features were more important to that specific client, but he seemed to think having the Gartner rec was critical. I said sure, then asked about the price, once I knew that I was clear that we weren't interested and thankfully he got the message and stopped calling. Maybe this is why my SMB IT company will never make the transition to enterprise clients. It gave me a pretty jaded view into how those types of reports work. It was hard to not think they are purchased to CYA (internal or external) when you end up recommending the wrong software. I hope that isn't always the case, maybe there is some great content in them, but at 50K I'll never know :)