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Comment by etaioinshrdlu | Hacker News Reader

Gitlab, from my outside perspective, seems to be a company run with commonly accepted (here) best practicies through and through.

Very transparent to users, open core, very modern tech stack, entirely remote workforce, what more could you ask of a company? They aim to do things basically the way we as a community would ask.

How will it turn out? Anyone's guess :)

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> Gitlab, from my outside perspective, seems to be a company run with commonly accepted (here) best practicies through and through.

Don't they have massive scaling problems? And didn't they delete their production database by mistake recently?

GitHub doesn't seem to have faced the same problems - so it seems difficult to argue GitLab has better practices.

> what more could you ask of a company?

Reasonable page response times?

I guess we will see how it turns out. I think the lesson here is that you can't just attempt to follow best practices and accepted wisdom without really thinking for yourself. (Nor would I argue they were clearly following best DB practices!)

> what more could you ask of a company?

Support for plugins?

> didn't they delete their production database by mistake recently

That was in February 2017 [0]. Not exactly recently IMO.

I recall that Github also had data loss and scaling issues back when they were starting up. Those days are now gone for them though.

[0] - https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/01/gitlab-dot-com-database-...

February 2017 is very much recent days, though?

A year and a half in internet time might as well be a decade for the rest of the business world.

The real question is did they learn from their mistakes and implement better guardrails to prevent this from happening in the future?

Hey, thank you for the feedback. We are heavily focusing on performance improvements - both in the product (so that features run better)[1] and in our GitLab.com infrastructure team (so that GitLab.com runs more reliably)[2]. We stayed transparent about the database incident and people really appreciated that.

[1] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests?label....

[2] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues

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