willhallonline

I think it is more an effort to be able to quantise value when others suggest that "We need DevOps" or "DevOps is driving improvement/innovation" but trying to understand how and where you can use resources to better improve ROI.

Episode Summary

On this episode of if/else, host Mayuko Inoue looks at two software development version control platforms: GitHub and GitLab.

While both platforms offer Git repository hosting, issue tracking, and integrations, there are important differences in cost, popularity, security, and philosophy.

The episode begins with a quick backgrounder on these two platforms, and then you’ll hear from several software developers about their experiences with each.

You’ll also meet Tim Skaggs. Tim is a VP of Engineering at the hiring management software company ApolloFactor. His team currently uses GitHub, but Tim is considering a move to GitLab to save money and streamline certain processes around continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). But is this the right move? Will it solve some of the team’s challenges, or will they regret the move?

To help Tim make the best choice for his company, we’ve enlisted the help of two experts to debate the pros and cons of each option.

Phil Haack is the proprietor of Haacked LLC. He was a director of engineering at GitHub and helped make GitHub friendly to developers on the Microsoft platform.

Will Hall is a DevOps Consultant at HeleCloud, and a GitLab Hero with a passion for open source software.

Phil and Will join Mayuko to try to surface the most important information that Tim should consider, and to game out the best scenarios for Tim’s team.

Web Browser: Brave (Chromium)

Terminal: Terminal (with oh-my-zsh)

IDE: VS Code

Basic Text Editor: VS Code

PDF Reader: Brave (Chromium)

Office Suite: Google Docs/Sheets etc

Calendar: Google Calendar

Video Player: VLC

Music Player: mplayer

Image manipulation: GIMP

The main things I always add are GIMP, Brave, oh-my-zsh and VLC. Getting a good/working browser does most work for me.

As someone who has been a freelancer and ran a web development company for a time (now I work in DevOps), I would suggest that the market for web development as a freelancer is limited. Honestly, I think that you would spend most of your time picking up clients, who regularly will not want to pay the rates that would cover your costs, let alone allow you to make a profit.

However, contracting seems as strong as it ever has done, especially in areas like Javascript and Python development. I would opt for contracting rather than freelancing, especially if you are able to get remote contracts.

I know lots of people who do make a living from web development, but they are largely within medium sized companies that have a marketing/sales budget and are able to cope with multiple large contracts simultaneously.

Really interesting overview. Thanks for publishing. You should probably submit this somewhere into https://docs.docker.com

I have used this with a large company before to suggest that switching off servers when not in use was not only more cost-efficient but also helped with sustainability targets (especially if we could track it).

This suggests so much that it is so important to choose the right partners for the job. Accenture has certainly made mistakes and I would presume that Hertz has a long contract to use Accenture as an outsourcing provider, so it may well not have been an option to use anyone else. But, what a farce.

Everyone has the ability to make mistakes, but you probably wouldn't hire a plumber to change your electrics. And I would think that the chances are that the actual work is being completed by people who have little understanding of the job they are supposed to be completing (and it appears maybe even the tools they are supposed to be using).

The extra frustrating things are that I am sure this will be used by people to suggest at why software projects fail; whereas, it is probably more symptomatic of a string of errors over project planning and understanding.

Alternatives inside GitLab Serverless (https://about.gitlab.com/product/serverless/) would be great. At the moment they have Knative, but enabling more gives a richer possible experience.

I am pretty sure that for the amount of savings most companies can make through removing data retention, working out what data to remove is far, far more costly.

I think that currently the serious consequences are the amount of businesses that expended huge amounts of cash and time to getting towards compliance. It has focused every business on the data that they generate and keep. Overall, the main consequence that I see currently, is that almost every business has some idea about GDPR and your data. Surely that is the largest consequence?

Overall, this is trying to give more support for pushing functions to Kubernetes using Knative as the method. I believe that there will be some support built in to GitLab for supporting Knative functions. I also know that this already works with OpenFaaS and OpenFaaS cloud, whereas Lambda normally is not deployed directly to Kubernetes, although you can use GitLab CI to do this.

Serverless has been on the roadmap for a little while: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/155 - I saw a demo of using OpenFaaS (https://www.openfaas.com) as a serverless endpoint for GitLab around 3 months ago. I think that the effort here is to control software, the deployment to Kubernetes is just an additional thing that is tied to the overall software development life cycle. I don't think that GitLab is looking at running against AWS as a cloud provider, but more at being a control plane for managing software. And for that, for me, it is far ahead of the competition.

The tldr is Drupal 7/8 end of life by November 2021 and Drupal 9 released before then.

I would probably say that 15k are probably dead. But there is quite a lot of use of the top modules. And a lot of developers involved.

I am super excited by this as it is both a big coup for GitLab (a lot of projects and developers) and a great leap forward for drupal.org tooling and workflow.

Smile more. Because it will make you happier and everyone around you happier. Everything will become easier if you smile more.

Consistently impressed and surprised with how quickly GitLab appear to be able to deliver value to users. I am certain that we will be using both Pages and Squash on Merge in the near future.

I am running QuickBooks business for my personal finances. I realise that it has some parts that are not needed, but it is good that I don't have to learn anything new. Also my accountant can directly see my finances to do a return if required.

There really is no substitute to knowing people, whether at meetups, conferences, training, contributions to open source. Certainly if you want more exposure pick something with a small following and join the Slack channel and ask if anyone has anything they want help with. You will quickly become someone who is trusted if you can deliver.

I guess my main concern is that I, daily, see that a lot of software is just about working when it is shipped. I would love to be able to program my car, but I do wonder about the people who are running the hypothetical dev version which still pulls to the right. Or just download something from Github and run it.