Blog Company GitLab Live Event Recap
Published on: September 14, 2016
7 min read

GitLab Live Event Recap

Watch the recording of the GitLab Master Plan plus event highlights and slides.

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Join us for our next webcast on September 29th for an introduction to Cycle Analytics and a 8.12 Feature Release demo.

The world of software development is changing and time to market matters more now than ever before. The world's best companies are reducing cycle time to ship software at an incredible pace. In this brave new world, businesses that can iterate more quickly than their competitors will win. To help you stay competitive, we are building the most natural and cohesive process for teams to move from idea to production in a single UI.

Following the announcement of our $20M Series B funding led by August Capital, we hosted a live event with our CEO Sid Sijbrandij and MC Jono Bacon. More than 1,000 GitLab community members attended to watch, ask questions, and contribute to the conversation. Within 12 hours of our funding announcement, 2,508 new projects were added to GitLab. Thanks to our awesome community for your continued support!

In This Webcast

  • The Nature of Open Source Communities
  • GitLab's Evolution
  • The Software Development Revolution
  • Introduction to Conversational Development (ConvDev)
  • GitLab in a Conversational World
  • Demo Video
  • Panel and Q&A Session with Villi Iltchev, partner at August Capital, GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij, VP of Product Job van der Voort, and CMO Ashley Smith.

Recording & Slides

Event recording


Demo Recording


Slides

Key Takeaways

If you don’t have time to watch the full video, here are the highlights.

Building an Open Source Community

Building great open source communities isn't easy. Collaboration requires human interaction, but human dynamics are often irrational yet predictable. When we harness these basic behavioral economics principles, we can make better systems that help us work together.

Live Event presentation - slide 6

GitLab's Evolution

GitLab started in 2011 as an open source project simply because "we wanted an open source git solution so we built GitLab," according to Dmitriy Zaporozhets, co-founder and CTO. Today, we've grown from a team of 2 to 104 team members spanning 33 countries. As of May 2016, we have over 1,000 contributors!

Over the last year we have made some incredible improvements to our product. We made amazing improvements in hosting, released GitLab Pages for static sites, and we have GitLab Geo that allows you to work with a remote team. Continuous Integration is getting even better with pipelines in the product and a Docker Container Registry. The interface has seen a lot of changes and improvements including our Issue Board release. We're excited about all of the improvements we've made so far and can't wait to share more with you.

The Software Development Revolution

As the world of software development evolves, outdated processes like Waterfall, Scrum, and Agile aren't suitable for the modern developer. There are five factors driving this change: shifts in the market, changes in developer roles and the ways we communicate, an explosion of new tools, and the transformation of how modern teams work together to move faster and reduce cycle time.

Reduce Cycle Time to Improve Efficiency

Cycle time is the time it takes to move [from idea to production][ci-cd-cd].

To adapt to the emerging new world of software development, teams need to ship code faster. This is best accomplished by reducing the cycle time to 57 minutes by establishing cross-functional teams, automated testing, adopting infrastructure as code, and by removing hand-offs.

Conversational Development (ConvDev)

Conversational Development (ConvDev) is a natural evolution of software development that carries a conversation across functional groups throughout the development process, enabling developers to track the full path of development in a cohesive and intuitive way. ConvDev accelerates the development lifecycle by fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing from idea to production.

5 Principles of Conversational Development

  1. Reduce the cycle time to increase effectiveness
  2. Monitor the process from idea to production
  3. Thread the conversations through all stages
  4. Gatekeepers become part of the conversation
  5. The rest of the organization can contribute

Benefits of ConvDev

  1. Shipping smaller and simpler changes is more efficient
  2. Frequent interactions gather more information
  3. Quicker to respond to market need
  4. Higher predictability
  5. Sense of progress

GitLab Product Vision

We plan to ship all 10 steps in the modern development lifecycle:

FROM IDEA TO PRODUCTION IN 10 STEPS

From ideation and planning to committing, testing, deploying, and getting feedback, we are building a toolset that takes an all-inclusive approach to the development process. You should honestly hear Sid talk about what we have planned:

  • [19:50] "We'll be shipping Cycle Analytics this month"
  • [20:00] "After we ship all of these steps, we're not done. We want to make integrations better"
  • [20:15] "We want to become the solution for conversational development"
  • [20:20] "We'll ship cycle time, we'll ship review apps"
  • [20:32] "We'll ship with Prometheus for monitoring"
  • [20:50] "We'll ship better with container schedulers"
  • [21:10] "We think it's great to use GitLab for everything, but we're going to make sure we have all the APIs"
  • [22:00] "We want to make GitLab and GitLab.com faster"
  • [22:10] "We want to make it easy to migrate to GitLab"

GitLabLive Community Discussion

Take a look at the discussion on the event using the hashtag #GitLabLive. It's awesome to seeing the community engagement, we thank you all!

Let's Talk More About it?

Please keep the comments coming! We'll be glad to hear your impressions, opinions, questions, ideas, and feedback on our direction towards Conversational Development. Use the hashtag #ConvDev to join the discussion.

Thank you again for your massive collaboration, the entire GitLab Team was super excited to see everyone popping up in the event chat and social media feeds!

We'll be happy to see you again in our next webcast on September 29th for an introduction to Cycle Analytics and a 8.12 Feature Release demo. Register here.

As always, if you have any questions feel free to comment on this post or tweet at us.

We want to hear from you

Enjoyed reading this blog post or have questions or feedback? Share your thoughts by creating a new topic in the GitLab community forum. Share your feedback

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