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Comment by tqkxzugoaupvwqr | Hacker News Reader

I started using GitLab a week ago. Only because they offer free private repos. GitLab feels unpolished and I encountered so many small UI bugs. If they said they are three people and just founded their startup, ok, sure. But Series D, at a $1B valuation? I guess their priorities lie somewhere else.

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They are kind of open about their priorities, strategy, and roadmap. For anyone curious:

https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/

https://about.gitlab.com/direction/

What is the first thing you think we should fix?

Not gp, but: you have a marvelous security system, but GitLab Pages does not use it. For an installation containing private/protected projects, this severely limits the use of Pages.

For example, it is not possible to use Pages to build documentation that should only be available to project members. Everything published to Pages is available to the public.

Thanks! I see you also contributed this as an issue https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/33422 and we plan to make this in the next 4-7 releases. Many of our users have a self-managed installation that is behind the firewall so for them this is less relevant. But we understand the urgency. And of course it would be even quicker if someone can contribute this functionality.

I've been following that one for a long time. Someone started a contribution for it (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/18589) and there's a GitLab person that appears to be very responsive, so it's going to land eventually.

Once that lands, it would be amazing to have a way to leverage CI + pages + auth to provide docs for external users. For years, I've been looking for a way to host authenticated, infrequently used docs. There are no options. Static sites on self-hosted, authenticated GitLab Pages would be perfect if I didn't have to pay for every user.

I think it would be a business mistake for them to prioritize this feature over others.

Possibly. For our use case (300 users, 900 projects), it makes Pages a non-starter. And the upside would be to move almost all technical documentation from SharePoint to GitLab, which would make the platform significantly more sticky than it is today.

As a now-more-active user of Gitlab (cf. my other comment in this post): I think you should prioritize cleaning up your project management tooling UI.

The project sidebar is a mess. Full of stuff most projects most likely don't use (I bet the "Operations" and "Registry" sections are used by <1% of projects).

Stuff that is conceptually duplicated. And also there's yet another "Settings" sub-section.

If I want to configure CI for example I have to switch between https://gitlab.com/$project/settings/ci_cd and https://gitlab.com/$project/pipelines - confusing what's where.

The CI UI could use some reorganization as well. It still takes me several clicks to get to the current running build log from the project homepage.

Your UI has improved a lot since the old days. I'm glad you found the right balance between "carbon-copying github" and "having your own completely unique identity". I hope you can focus more on UI and UX though. Especially with a featureset the size of Gitlab, retaining a good UI becomes harder, even more so as the ways people use your product differ more and more.

Thanks for the feedback @scrollaway. I appreciate that fact you recognize we have made a lot of improvements and that there is a challenge in scaling and keeping the user experience consistent.

"Stuff that is conceptually duplicated. And also there's yet another "Settings" sub-section."

I am curious to learn more about what you feel is duplicated in the sidebar? The 'settings'in the sidebar is specific to the project you are currently viewing. The 'settings' in your avatar drop-down is specific to you. Are there other duplications?

"The CI UI could use some reorganization as well. It still takes me several clicks to get to the current running build log from the project homepage."

We agree! We have an epic to prioritize UI/UX improvements for CI/CD. It is still being updated but you can view it here: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/295. I would love to hear any more specific area you think we should concentrate on.

The most jarring duplication I keep encountering is `Sidebar => Settings => CI/CD` vs. `Sidebar => CI/CD`. I understand they don't do the same thing, but the way it's presented, the sidebar is already the settings.

Registry should probably be under Operations, too? All in all there's a lot of stuff in the sidebars and it's very hard to find my way through them, especially the bits I don't often use.

Making it possible to find an image in the registry. Can't sort by date. Have to go (slowly) paging through hundreds to find them. No automatic culling. It's a nightmare. And you must surely be accruing many TB of images people don't need anymore.

I use gitlab every day. When we get a large MR gitlab is almost unusable. You need to add pagination instead of auto-closing file diffs. The page gets so slow to the point that there are multiple seconds of lag time when you type or do any action. Sure it's not a great idea to have huge MRs but sometimes it happens. And when it does it makes me want to not use this product

Their staff is globally 'remote' with salaries determined by where you live i.e. cheap labor.

So a developer in a Dhaka, Bangladesh is making the same as a developer in Palto Alto, California despite contributing the same work?

No, I'd expect them to make significantly less than someone in the Bay based on Gitlabs compensation calculator.

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