
GitLab 9.1 Released with Service Desk, Canary Deployments, and Burndown Charts - doubleg
https://about.gitlab.com/2017/04/22/gitlab-9-1-released/
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noarchy
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.

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sdesol
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.

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sytse
What would you like to see in a next generation issue trackers, search, or
build solution?

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sdesol
I suspect the next big thing will be to incorporate machine learning into the
software development life cycle.

    
    
      - Issue comments that are no longer relevant, should be collapsed by default.
      - You should be able to get a "too long; did not read" for issue comments.
      - Searches should be context aware.  Matches should take into consideration the user, time, branch (is this a release branch, developer branch, shared development branch, etc.) and so on.
      - Build logs should include a "too long; did not read"
      - Builds should be context aware to prevent wasting of resources.
    

I guess what ever can save time, money and speed development would be next
generation features.

I'm not sure what GitLab's sales engagement looks like, but if you are not,
you should be asking to speak with a company's internal, tools dev team, if
you can. Large companies spend an insane amount of money and time,
creating/maintaining bespoked dev tools for internal use. Companies like
Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. spend millions in labour cost annually, to
build and maintain their internal solutions.

GitLab's goal, should be to see if they can create comparable solutions, that
can be managed by small startups and mid size companies. Having worked in
tools dev for Enterprise, I knew being able to search and analzye anything, is
a time saver, but I also knew, it would be cost prohibitive for many smaller
companies to provide such a solution internally.

This was why I set out to develop a solution that could be maintained by
companies of all sizes and this should be the thought process for GitLab, in
my opinion. If GitLab wants to work on solving the harder problems, it should
understand what companies are spending internal resources on
creating/maintaining and see if they can't make it available for the masses.

What you learn could lead to more intelligent code review solutions among
other things. In a lot of ways, you are trying to capture somebodies skill
set/knowledge, which isn't all that trivial.

~~~
sytse
I'm onboard with the: ask large companies what they are making. The cycle
analytics feature comes to mind as something that they mention.

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bobsam
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".

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orf
Then that recruiter is utterly worthless and you should contact the tech lead
a at the companyuestion and let them know.

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bobsam
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).

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orf
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?

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salex89
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...

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sytse
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.

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themihai
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)

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sytse
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.

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markdog12
Favicon turning into runner progress indicator is a nice touch. Useful when
you have lots of tabs open.

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

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0x0
This page crashes a lot on iOS!

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jobvandervoort
Apologies. I'm pushing an update that should significantly reduce image size.

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sytse
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/...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-
com/merge_requests/5764/diffs)

