It doesn't take much investigation to start seeing problems, or to see major lapses in engineering from both a concrete (e.g., bugs) and a process (e.g., data loss) perspective. The data loss event that made it clear that GitLab a) never tested its backups b) didn't have a real monitoring/alarming system to inform its employees when things broke c) did not have processes enforcing clear separation between production environments and d) did not know how to configure a PostgreSQL cluster, among many other basic flaws, is just one recent example. The postmortem for that event included the accidental disclosure of a serious DoS exploit, itself the symptom of poor engineering practice (hard-deleting all content flagged as spam, making it impossible to redeem erroneously targeted content; a user could maliciously trigger such deletes with minor effort), which was live on the site until a couple of hours after that disclosure was discussed on HN. As I understand the ticket explaining this, the entire spam cleanup system was shut off until they could teach it not to hard delete anymore. Many other junior-level mistakes are regularly discovered and discussed, both on their bug tracker and elsewhere.
Other than that, GitLab is a beast to install and navigate and it requires a lot of resources. Rails is slow. The UI is weird (frequently end up not finding the repo I want due to the way the "trending" tab works). There are other issues. I'm not a GitLab contributor so I don't really have more technical detail, I just use it sometimes.
It seems like you're just assuming they're a great company with a well-engineered product because you like the corporate image they project.
I don't know of anything about them that makes either themselves or their product "amazing". It is somewhat usable, which is good; I'm not trying to besmirch the earnest efforts of people to make something that works, and indeed there are some uses for something like GitLab. That doesn't mean that GitLab is "amazing" or that their product is flawless or even good.
The most exciting thing about GitLab to me is remotely distributed teams, which I usually love seeing, but I think they've gone about it all wrong.
Other than that, GitLab is a beast to install and navigate and it requires a lot of resources. Rails is slow. The UI is weird (frequently end up not finding the repo I want due to the way the "trending" tab works). There are other issues. I'm not a GitLab contributor so I don't really have more technical detail, I just use it sometimes.
It seems like you're just assuming they're a great company with a well-engineered product because you like the corporate image they project.
I don't know of anything about them that makes either themselves or their product "amazing". It is somewhat usable, which is good; I'm not trying to besmirch the earnest efforts of people to make something that works, and indeed there are some uses for something like GitLab. That doesn't mean that GitLab is "amazing" or that their product is flawless or even good.
The most exciting thing about GitLab to me is remotely distributed teams, which I usually love seeing, but I think they've gone about it all wrong.