HN user
I think they are running to catch up on the gitlab system itself, let alone running it as a production service. The bugs in the last few months have been epic. Backups not working, merge requests broken, chrome users seeing bugs, chaotic support. Basically their qa and release processes are not remotely enterprise ready.
The real problem I have is the low network performance. Yes, yes, before everyone jumps all over me and points to Jupiter etc.. I understand the problems in Pb/s bisection bandwidth for the large datacenters. That doesn't change the fact that I don't need an entire datacenter worth of stuff.. but I do need an Amdahl-balanced cluster. So big machines with wimpy (20Gb non-RDMA) networks prevent me doing my HPCish workloads on GCE.
Followed by waiting on GPUs and other user accessible accelerators of course.
On the one hand, there a significant number of people that can't fizzbuzz applying for the jobs.
On the other hand, there are a significant number of people that can only do the interviews and are not good engineers in general once hired.
This is made even worse by 1) the cottage industry teaching people to crack/break the interview process, and 2) the number of people hyping their personal "brand" via conf talks, standards nonsense, etc. as a way to sidestep more engineering vetting. (Not everyone does this of course -- but there's a significant number of people that do it just for career upside).
Personal anecdote as a hiring manager: I've found that some of the best interviewees but mediocre mid-level engineers are those with a history of low to mid-level jobs at the largest companies.
Right now this seems mostly to consist of javascript wrappers around existing platform libraries? E.g. to let me read a gpio pin or blink a led? Not that it's a bad thing but it seems a little skinny as a thing right now, and the pitch seems to be that more and more platform stuff arrives. Smells more like a replay for firefox os less innovating on the platform? Any insights?
They talk about running their own hardware so assume something like open compute or backblaze. But without the size or reliability of S3. Can't imagine they'll be able to do it at lower cost than Amazon either. Like you I have no idea why not use S3.
Reading through the spin.. it's just an object store and pubsub with some demo apps? Like S3 and SNS on Amazon or Google Datastore and Cloud pubsub? That's it? Why would anyone use this instead of AWS or Google?
Reading the article makes it sound like apps that upload to object store backend and that they installed some pub sub system to push notifications. Takes 4 years? Seems like spin.
I interviewed there and glassdoor review is accurate for backend. No SRE and my SWE interviewers had obviously never built production scale services. Some managers had run backups. They made a big deal of custom this and custom that but you sign an nda on details. Hints are in public like engs who work there submitting patches from personal gmail for ceph though. My impression was many engs leaving and those staying taking over but not understanding the why as well as how.