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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

This was very cringey. A super contrived demo and bashing Heroku through a Twitter reference. Reads like someone is drunk/high and wanted to shitpost about a competitor. I would be appalled by this if I were GitLab's PR department!

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Yeah, seems they are trying to deflect their posts like this with a " This blog post is Unfiltered" notice that apparently frees them from anything mentioned as the blog is "intended for user-generated content submitted by the GitLab team. The views and opinions represented in this blog are personal to the author of each respective blog post and do not represent the views or opinions of GitLab unless explicitly stated"

Feels like an easy way out to claim whatever you want on company property without getting in trouble.

Legally they may not be in trouble, their brand is still tarnished imo. My esteem for GitLab has diminished as a result of this terrible blog post.

It was a bad blog post, we're sorry. Also see the comment by the author https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26555617

This post is really embarrassing, I would just take it down.

And you should really institute a review process. There is no such thing as "unfiltered" blog posts on an official domain.

It reflects badly on the company.

Or an easy way for a company to get the credit for a popular post, and hang a contributor out to dry if it's poorly received. Do the work and properly vet and edit your posts, and insist your employees post their own opinions on other platforms on their own time.

Calling it "user-generated content" when it's generated only by employees not actual GitLab users is quite disingenuous.

Besides, disclaimers like that don't even legally work. Employers can't disclaim responsibility for what their employees do when it is within the scope of their employment.

The only thing they succeeded in was reminding me how good Heroku is compared to whatever they're trying to sell

Unless you need to scale up. Then it is significantly more expensive. Their PostgreSQL offering uses AWS on the backend too so once you start needing to make more changes or specify regions/sites it makes sense to switch to RDS, plus you end up saving a lot of money.

The scaling / costs are an issue but then you're not using Heroku anyway and ... probably not whatever that blog is trying to sell you on ;)

> I have been a backend focussed developer in the past 20 years, web development is often fighting with Javascript and CSS. Especially Heroku as a deployment platform is a new area for me.

No editing either...

I found the article confusing. It was difficult to understand what they're actually doing (I'm still unclear on that, actually).

The documentation might help you to better understand what we're building: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/5-minute-production-app/deploy...

Why would I go to the docs if you can't even describe it properly in a blog post?

I would definitely caution you + the author of this post to tone down the rhetoric. Heroku has earned a tremendous amount of goodwill by being... basically fucking awesome and enabling tremendous amounts of productivity without having to screw around with infinite configuration settings. Just earn your own goodwill on your own merits, not by denigrating an extremely competent "competitor"

Yeah, a basic rule is don't bad mouth competition, it will always reflect on you and not your competition.

Thanks for the feedback. I agree.

Is like the writer had a momentary stroke in places.

Agreed. Also, note this weird little flag/notice from the post:

> This blog post is Unfiltered

with a link to the "legal disclaimer":

> DISCLAIMER: This blog is intended for user-generated content submitted by the GitLab team. The views and opinions represented in this blog are personal to the author of each respective blog post and do not represent the views or opinions of GitLab unless explicitly stated. All content provided on this blog is for informational purposes only. Neither GitLab nor any of the individual blog contributors ("Contributors") make any representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information on this site. Neither GitLab nor any Contributors will be liable for any errors or omissions in this information or any losses, injuries, or damages from the display or use of this information. Comments are welcome, and in fact, encouraged. However, GitLab reserves the right to edit or delete any comments submitted to this blog without notice should GitLab determine them to i) be spam or questionable spam; ii) include profanity; iii) include language or concepts that could be deemed offensive, hate speech, credible threats, or direct attacks on an individual or group; or iv) are in any other way a violation of GitLab's Website Terms of Use. GitLab is not responsible for the content in comments. This policy is subject to change at any time.

It's written by a developer with a disclaimer that it's "unfiltered". I think it's part of their PR strategy to sound authentic and not salesy. Seems to mostly work for them.

Authentically cringey

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