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Comment by tnolet | Hacker News Reader

> "A typical web app requires a database, storage or caching backend, which can get complicated to run with Heroku."

Ah no. That is exactly where Heroku is dead easy. The creating, maintaining, updating and general day-to-day management of these "addons" require almost no input from the user. DB failover and mgmt is almost magic.

I wished GitLab would stay away from this needless, click bait type articles. It's not even well researched, almost if they never really ran a serious app on Heroku.

Sure Heroku has quirks (no http2) but I bet a lot less quirks than a homegrown GitLab CI + Terraform solution.

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Agree on the storage point, I used their Redis and Postgres options for a few years with no real issues. Everything was seamless, even maintenance. The only complaint I could have would be cost, but that is expected.

Also, using S3 is simple and shouldn't incur much cost due to running in the same AWS region.

I agree but you're replying to the wrong comment

Thanks, we detached it from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26554734 now.

You're reading an employee's blog post not a gitlab corporate announcement. It's clear the author hasn't used Heroku's paid services at a larger scale given the points you've already made. I totally agree with the ease of use for Heroku and if you want to eat part of their market share you better make sure you're focused on the right aspect of Heroku.

It's a blog post on the company's official blog, no? I doubt it's like a free-for-all where any employee can post whatever they want without any review. Judging GitLab based on the content posted on their blog seems like fair game.

> It's a blog post on the company's official blog, no?

No. There’s a notice saying it’s unfiltered, with a link leading to a disclaimer saying, pretty much:

> it's like a free-for-all where any employee can post whatever they want without any review.

Or, in their own words:

> 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.

Regardless of its unofficial status, it's a post promoting the company's products in a public space, where the employee is representing the company. As a GitLab employee agrees above, it's fair to judge the company and hold them to a high standard based on how their employees present their work in the public sphere.

> As a GitLab employee agrees above

That employee being the CEO ;)

It is fair game to judge us based on our blog. At the same time it is a free-for-all for employees for blog posts marked Unfiltered as this one is. The author apologized in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26555617 and we've made 8+ updates to the article to reduce the bias https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/commits/maste...

That sort of disclaimer is either naive or disingenuous

No one knows or cares what "unfiltered" means. My initial take was "unfiltered" meant "straight talk." There's no reason for a casual visitor to have any clue it means "rando blog rant spam."

This sort of post on this sort of domain is implicitly endorsed by the corporation and it's malpractice to pretend otherwise.

It's an admirable attempt to break the stuffy "professional" atmosphere. Let people be themselves, imperfections and all. For that, I applaud the effort. Maybe they want to detract the type of person who places this much weight on such silly matters because those exact types in my experience are difficult to work with.

Wow.

sytse, there's no one else I know who's your equal in the kind of leadership you show in managing GitLab.

The transparency, the honesty in everything GitLab does is truly astonishing. Thanks for letting folks like me who know next-to-nothing about building companies be a fly-on-the-wall from oceans away, watch your meetings on YouTube, go through your plans and processes, observe eng designs and discussions around them, among other valuable career-building things. What you're doing is tectonic, all the while continuing to grow what's already a huge business.

Thank you.

Idk about transparent. They deliberately hid their "open compensation calculator."

https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation...

That's increasing opaqueness.

GitLab employee here. That was based on requirements outside of our control - and it is still available to employees and candidates. Everything is public by default, except for things that can't be - but we're public about what isn't public: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/#not-public

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