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Comment by vincentkriek | Hacker News Reader

I think you are right about how GitLab started. There is, and there should be, a lot of frustration about the biggest open source hub (GitHub) not being open-source themselves. This feels backwards and creates a harsh dictatorship that shouldn't be. GitLab tried to solve that by making an open source version and because it now can be improved upon by everybody new features start to appear. I love the self hosted aspect of GitLab and I think they should keep focussing on that however their instance of GitLab [1] is notoriously slow and unreliable. A hobbyist should not need to host their own repo, they should be able to rely on their SaaS. I would love it if GitLab.com could be rock stable like GitHub

[1] http://gitlab.com

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> A hobbyist should not need to host their own repo, they should be able to rely on their SaaS. I would love it if GitLab.com could be rock stable like GitHub

Believe me, we would too and we are sorry about the current state of GitLab.com. We are working on improving performance in Q1 2016: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues

It may be more stable than GitLab, but I have never thought of GitHub as "rock stable."

Can you comment more on why a hobbyist should not need their own repo? If I'm doing SaaS for everything, my monthly costs start to go up. I've found it is far cheaper, and far (way!) more educational to take an extra box out of the basement and install Ubuntu/GitLab/Node/Java/Apache/Etc. I have to pay for internet either way, and the electricity cost is nowhere near the cost of having multiple Saas?

Most of the time, it's because of opportunity cost: The time you're spending building a server, learning how to manage repos, setting up redundancy and just trying to get the thing working, you could've spent on whatever product you were trying to produce, and would likely be much further along with if you hadn't done everything the hard way.

That's not to say there isn't educational value, but a common piece of advice I've gotten is "Don't optimize for anything but your life." Or more easily explained: Don't optimize for things you don't need to.

The opportunity cost on the front side is often worth it but the long term benefit on the back side is you aren't dependent on that SaaS, are running stuff you know something about and have a lot of flexibility.

I'm from the old school, I use SaaS/PaaS mostly for stuff I know is painful to do yourself (sometimes file storage, nearly always email) but the rest lives on vanilla boxes configured with ansible (frankly ansible is faster to use once you get your head around it than learning 5 different PaaS setups).

Can you suggest a good way to get started with Ansible?

The ansible docs are excellent and walk you through the process, one thing I did (and would suggest) is use vagrant (or similar) with ansible, it has built in support for it and it allows you build/tear-down way faster while you are learning.

I just installed Ansible on a workstation and started playing with it to configure a server (the server only needs SSH). Or, use this guide:

http://www.ansible.com/get-started

Building on the other answers, I think it is more awful for pros. Hobbyists don't have deadlines and spend time on computers because of love, not to pay rent.

That said, you do have a point, and you decide what matters to you as a hobbyist (or whatever you decide to call yourself).

I personally like (and need, most of the time) stuff that "just works", so I totally get your point about optimizing and agree with it.

what's the cost of freedom and independence ?

I'm personally glad to have done things the hard way, sure it took some time to learn but learning sysadmin made me a better developer.

To me, setting up a repository, an issue tracker, a wiki etc. was more about learning about a process than learning "how to make it work on the server".

Process as "how to organise the production of writing software" and this is imho extremely important, I reuse what I learned all the time from web app to mobile app to server backend etc.

Simply put, I see a lot of people who fail to deal with software production simply because they just use the tool "a la mode" like Github, but are completely oblivious to the benefits of using semantic versioning, an issue tracker, a wiki for documentation, etc.

When you learn all that by yourself, you can compare different tools and have a feel for what's a "bare minimum", you just know how to manage/organise a project a make it work in production.

Time isn't free and maintaining Gitlab, for instance, eats up maybe 30 minutes a month.

Maintaining the 10x SaaS services you use in a similar vein suddenly starts eating up close to whole days.

> A hobbyist should not need to host their own repo, they should be able to rely on their SaaS. I would love it if GitLab.com could be rock stable like GitHub

I completely disagree, here a little story

before 2005 I was hosting my own SVN repos, then came a community "we host your open source project for free" and I moved my sources there

and it closed, so I moved all my repos (they kept growing) to google code

my main reason to move to google code was "its' google they will never close down"

guess what? few years later, google code close down

at that point I decided NERVER EVER AGAIN, I moved all my repos to my own private dedicated server

now I do use Github but as a mirror, they can close down tomorrow I don't care (note: I don't wish them that)

Some people take their repositories very seriously, hobbyist or not, for me it's like backup you only see how important the infrastructure is when the shit hits the fan.

Things like Github, Gitlab, etc. are nice but it's merely a beautiful web UI on top of what is important: the repository.

My point is even if you are an hobbyist you should own and control your repository, if you can host it on a dedicated server, or at home on a spare box, whatever, do it, do own it (the infra), yes because a tarball archive of your repo and a JSON export of your issues is completely useless.

> you should own and control your repository

Doesn't every distributed system let you keep your own repo under your control? I have all my projects on github but if github disappeared tomorrow I'd just push my repos to a different service.

As a hobbyist I only commit one small thing a week or so without any issues. I'm curious what stability issues they have for later projects, if you'd care to elucidate?

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