March 2017 Summaries

In 2016, two GitLab developers embarked on a global journey to work remotely while visiting colleagues and attending tech conferences. Their travels took them to various cities, including Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Sofia, Warsaw, Nice, Madrid, Braga, Lisbon, Edinburgh, Tel Aviv, Taipei, Bali, and Sydney, allowing them to experience diverse cultures and cuisines. The trip emphasized the benefits and challenges of GitLab's remote work culture, highlighting the flexibility of working from anywhere and the opportunity to connect with team members worldwide. The journey included attending conferences like EuRuKo and Rails Israel, fostering community engagement, and underscoring GitLab's commitment to open-source collaboration. Despite the demanding nature of balancing work and travel, the experience was enriching and demonstrated the effectiveness of remote work, with the developers meeting colleagues, exploring local attractions, and adapting to various work environments. The adventure inspired other team members to embrace remote work from global destinations, continuing the spirit of work-travel integration.

GitLab emphasizes the importance of continuous methods, such as releasing early and often, to enhance team efficiency and consistent customer value delivery. A key feature supporting this approach is Review Apps, which are temporary app environments created automatically for each new branch and removed when the branch is deleted. This allows for easy testing and demonstration of new features without the need for individual development environments. The development of Review Apps involved simplifying the initial implementation to focus on essential features, enabling quick user feedback and iterative improvements. Subsequent updates refined the functionality by introducing automatic stopping and deletion of apps when branches are merged, demonstrating GitLab's commitment to continuous improvement.

Sean McGivern leads a demonstration of GitLab's typical code review process, highlighting its importance in managing the pressure to quickly ship new features as indicated by 81% of developers admitting to releasing code prematurely due to tight deadlines, according to a 2016 Developer Survey. GitLab's code review process involves a structured workflow where a developer makes changes in a feature branch, tests them, and submits a merge request, which then undergoes multiple levels of review and revision until it meets the required quality standards before merging. This rigorous review process aims to enhance code quality and delivery speed by ensuring no steps are skipped even under time constraints. The webcast "Code Review: A Business Imperative" offers further insights into the significance of code quality and how GitLab implements this process internally.

In the aftermath of a significant incident where a critical database was mistakenly deleted at GitLab, the company faced the challenge with transparency and community support. The engineer responsible, known as "team-member-1," was not only recognized for the error but also for their exemplary contributions to the company, ultimately earning a promotion to senior developer. GitLab emphasized their core values of transparency, collaboration, and learning from mistakes, receiving overwhelming support from their community and peers in the tech industry through messages and gestures of solidarity like #HugOps. The incident highlighted the importance of acknowledging and learning from errors rather than penalizing individuals, with GitLab focusing on infrastructure improvements to prevent future occurrences and celebrating the resilience and dedication of their team members.

Gitter, a popular platform for connecting the open source and software development community, has been acquired by GitLab, a company focused on enabling contributions from all developers. This acquisition aligns with GitLab's strategy to become a leading SaaS solution for public repositories by integrating essential project chat capabilities. Gitter will continue operating as a standalone network, offering free and unlimited chat for both public and private conversations. GitLab plans to enhance Gitter by open-sourcing it, adding "Login with GitLab," and integrating with GitLab groups and projects. The open-source transition is expected by June 2017, allowing users to run their own instances. Gitter's focus on public and open conversations distinguishes it from team collaboration tools like Mattermost and Slack, with all public conversation history being fully archived and searchable. The acquisition aims to bolster open source community engagement and collaboration, with future enhancements to be guided by community feedback.

Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne and GitLab CEO Sytse Sijbrandij recently discussed their commitment to transparency in their companies, which challenges traditional business practices. Both Buffer and GitLab are remote-only organizations that document extensively and publicly share information, such as financial models and company handbooks, to foster openness. However, they maintain confidentiality on sensitive matters like performance feedback and employment conditions to protect individuals' privacy. Each company has unique approaches to salary transparency and career progression, with Buffer using a salary formula and GitLab deploying a salary calculator. Both leaders aim to shift from "culture fit" to "cultural contribution" to promote diversity. As their companies grow, they face challenges in maintaining effective communication and structure in remote settings, yet continue to draw inspiration from other organizations known for innovation and customer focus.

GitKraken, a Git GUI client for Windows, Mac, and Linux, has introduced integration with GitLab, enhancing users' ability to manage repositories more efficiently. This new integration allows users to generate and connect SSH keys, manage remote repositories, initialize and clone repositories directly from GitKraken without needing to switch to the command line, and visually identify repository owners through avatars in the interface. This version 2.2 update leverages GitLab’s improved API, enabling seamless remote repository management and a more fluid workflow experience. The collaboration between GitKraken and GitLab aims to continue improving the integration, reflecting the teams' commitment to offering enhanced functionality and user experience.

In a video demonstration featured in the webcast "From Continuous Integration to Continuous Everything," Product Manager Joshua Lambert illustrates the ease of setting up a project using GitLab CI/CD, highlighting the benefits of implementing Continuous Integration practices across development teams. The demonstration aims to encourage teams not yet utilizing Continuous Integration more than 75 percent of the time to adopt these practices and see immediate results as features are developed. The webcast provides insights into Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment and promotes a continuous mentality throughout organizations, with the full session available on-demand for interested viewers.

In today's technology-driven business landscape, the alignment between engineering and business goals is crucial for success, as the technology stack plays a vital role in a company's operations and competitiveness. The concept of software craftsmanship, akin to civil engineering, emphasizes the importance of code quality, which supports rapid feature development, stability, and security—ultimately leading to tangible business benefits. However, a balance must be struck between maintaining code quality and incurring technical debt, especially for startups that may need to release products quickly to seize market opportunities. Effective communication between engineering and business teams is essential to navigate these challenges, as it fosters trust, efficiency, and a shared understanding of how engineering practices can drive business outcomes.

Developers view Continuous Integration as crucial to their workflow, but achieving a continuous development lifecycle requires more than just technical adjustments. Incorporating DevOps practices can facilitate better integration and collaboration among teams, reducing delays and preventing broken code by overcoming the "silo" mentality, where teams work in isolation. By maintaining open communication throughout the development process, teams can gather and integrate feedback continuously. Key strategies for adopting DevOps include decentralizing decision-making, which empowers teams to address issues swiftly, and continuously monitoring customer feedback through both explicit invitations and implicit behavior analysis. The transition to a more continuous workflow should be gradual and tailored to the specific needs of the product and company, with a focus on introducing suitable DevOps elements and iteratively refining them based on performance.

The Global Developer Report highlights the widespread use of open-source tools among developers, with 98% using them even when not officially sanctioned, revealing a strong preference for open source due to its rapid software evolution, transparency, and adaptability advantages. Developers appreciate the ability to swiftly fix bugs and adapt features to their needs, which open-source software facilitates by allowing access to inspect and modify the source code. Despite senior leadership's limited role in tool selection, developers frequently opt for open-source solutions, sometimes against managerial directives, which can lead to potential conflicts regarding tool usage, team satisfaction, and resource allocation. The report suggests that businesses should consider embracing open-source tools to align with developer preferences and optimize team performance.

In late 2016, GitLab considered transitioning from cloud-based infrastructure to bare metal servers, driven by potential cost savings and performance improvements. Despite initial plans to move to bare metal, GitLab ultimately decided to remain in the cloud, influenced by community feedback and the complexities associated with managing dedicated hardware. The debate highlighted challenges such as cost implications, infrastructure management, and the need for scalability. Community input underscored concerns about cloud performance, network design, and the trade-offs between cloud and bare metal solutions. GitLab's approach evolved to focus on optimizing cloud infrastructure using solutions like Gitaly to enhance Git access efficiency and scalability. The decision underscored a commitment to maintaining a stable and scalable environment while leveraging community insights to refine their architecture.