Sid and the GitLab team continue to enjoy their Rails-based “modular monolith”

A modular monolith is the exact opposite of a distributed ball of mud: a well-structured, well-architected, highly modular program that runs as a single process and is as boring as possible.

Sid doesn’t pull any punches. No regrets!

Wouldn’t it be better to have a proper plugin interface? Or better yet, a services interface modeled on microservices? In a word: no. Not only do these approaches impose deployment and integration hurdles that go far beyond “I made a small change to the source code,” they often enforce architectural constraints too rigidly. Anticipating all the future extension points is a fool’s errand, one that we luckily did not embark on and do not have to.

This week Sid Sijbrandij, Co-founder and CEO of GitLab, is back talking with Adam about all the details of their massive IPO last October 2021. To set the stage, this episode was recorded on Feb 1, 2022. During the show Adam mentioned they IPO’d at a $13B market cap, but they actually ended their opening day at approximately $15B. That’s a massive win for open source, GitLab, Sid, and the rest of the team. For loyal listeners you know we’ve had Sid on this show before, so of course we had to get him back on the show post-IPO to get all the details of this new journey.

Gitter is exiting GitLab and entering the Matrix…ok, we couldn’t help ourselves with that one. Today we’re joined by Sid Sibrandij (CEO of GitLab) and Matthew Hodgson (technical co-founder of Matrix) to discuss the acquisition of Gitter. A little backstory to tee things up…back in 2017 GitLab announced the acquisition of Gitter to help push their idea of chatops within GitLab. As it turns out, the GitLab team saw a different path for Gitter as a core part of Matrix rather than a non-core project at GitLab. We talk through all the details in this episode with Matthew and Sid.

Sid Sijbrandij is the Co-founder and CEO of GitLab — an all-remote company and complete DevOps platform. As a company, they have their eyes set on taking the company public to IPO and they’re very outspoken about their culture, open handbook, and how they work as an all-remote company. We talk through where Sid came from, the early days of GitLab, why IPO vs a private sale (like GitHub), what it means to put “family and friends first, work second,” how we should view work, and his biggest fear — the company failing.

Behind the scenes we heard about Sid’s idea of “family and friends first,” so we asked him to share the idea with our audience and how it’s being embraced at GitLab. Stay tuned for an upcoming episode of Founders Talk with Sid. I’m sure we’ll touch on this idea and more._

Even at GitLab, we’ve seen increased productivity as the number of merge requests for both March and April exceeded February’s numbers. But as company leader, I don’t see this as something to tout. This new normal is anything but normal, and we shouldn’t treat it as such. Even though GitLab has always been remote and experienced less of a transition than most other companies, our team members are not immune to the stressors of quarantine. Overworking or maintaining the status quo during a crisis is not a badge of honor. In fact, I would be prouder if more employees were taking time off to reset and refresh or spend time adjusting to this “new normal” with their families.

Sid Sijbrandij and the team at GitLab compared GitLab CI with the three Jenkins variants. Here’s what they learned…

The many plugin combinations for Jenkins has made Legacy Jenkins hard to configure and brittle when updating. Cloudbees is introducing two new versions of Jenkins to remedy the problem: Cloud Native Jenkins will start from scratch, while Jenkins Evergreen will focus on a set of essential plugins. GitLab CI adds new functionality in the main code base, avoiding the need for needless configuration and ensuring everything still works when updating.

Also to note — according to a recent Forrester report GitLab CI and Jenkins/Cloudbees are two of the four leading products for CI.

Sid Sijbrandij is on forbes.com petitioning for the future hacker generation.

Every 21st-century child has to learn about photosynthesis, electricity and the human digestive system. Why not teach them how to develop a software application or give them a chance to learn about algorithms?

Great question Sid!

In this episode of Spotlight recorded at OSCON London 2016, Jerod talked with Sid Sijbrandij (CEO of GitLab) who was recently on The Changelog discussing GitLab’s Master Plan and a new style of development they call “Conversational Development”, to talk about how they’re executing on that plan. We also discussed the recent controversy around GitLab and the removal (and subsequent reposting) of security research data. We enjoyed hearing how Sid turns everything in to an opportunity.

Sid Sijbrandij, CEO of GitLab, joined the show to talk about their recent unveiling of the GitLab Master Plan, $20 Million secured in a Series B funding round, their idea of Conversational Development in this “post Agile world”, and their focus on the enterprise and on-premise Git hosting as the business model to sustain and build GitLab into something ‘modern software teams’ can rely upon.”

Andrew and Adam talk with Sytse Sijbrandij, one of the Co-founders of GitLab, about building GitLab, sustaining open source, community management, and ways to handle a “road map” for your product or project.