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Comment by molteanu | Hacker News Reader

What is the actual usefulness for github (or gitlab) in a company setting?

In my free time, sure, I can browse github, search for projects, snippets of code, maybe raise some issues or fix something, but where I work, we do have github accounts but I don't think anybody uses the actual interface. We just store our repositories, and then use a git client to pull/push and view the changes, and Jira for tickets. Isn't the value of the product lost in this case or does github offer more than what meets the eye here? I mean, I would guess a simple server would be enough to store the repositories.

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So this is mostly about Gitlab EE/Github Enterprise in an enterprise setting:

1. Control of your data. You get to keep your code on your servers and don't have to worry about Github themselves being breached.

2. PR workflows to enforce code reviews. Also a central place to view them. Also it links to JIRA so you can go from a ticket to a code review.

3. Finding internal clients (more useful for big companies were you might not know all of them). "Hey, there's a security bug in InternalLib 3.5 and we need everyone to update to 3.6. Who's using it?". Hey, who owns/uses "m-asd-indexer.dc1.mycompany.com".

4. Familiarity. Most devs these days are at least aware of how open source github workflows work, as opposed to email + patches or other approaches.

5. Global search. "Oh, hey, InternalProcessor 4.6 is doing something odd when we call internalDooDad.foo(bar) . Let's go search for that and figure out if we can understand the behaviour". "Hey, we've standardised on service X for access control, how have other projects integrated it?"

How do they help with #3?

I find it useful when jumping into a repo that I don't normally clone, for linking to a specific line of code within a file and creating a discussion thread around that line, and for making quick fixes to eg string content during a shared PR workflow.

There are a lot of workflow tools that make your life easier as a developer. Indeed you can cobble them together from other tools (Gerrit, for instance, for merge requests) but having a vertically integrated suite developed by a single vendor for a bunch of small workflow improvements is really nice.

I find it useful for:

* Discoverability, in case you work in a company with thousands of repos

* Having discussions with multiple participants over a merge request

* Sometimes for communication its easier to provide a url pointing a given file/line, where someone can click and immediately see what you're talking about

GitLab is a bit nicer end-to-end that GitHub. Their issue tracking is more feature-rich (closer to JIRA than GitHub) and I find it works well for planning projects in small teams. It also has features such as a Docker registry, CI/CD, and Operations.

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