GitLab turns 10!

We're celebrating ten years since the first commit to the GitLab open source project.

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Thank you

Our 10 year milestone would not be possible without your contributions. Thank you for being part of our journey!

Contribute

Co-create GitLab with us.

GitLab is committed to the stewardship of the open source project. Help us build the future iteration to enable your own projects to thrive!

We value all types of contributions. Whether you're a project manager, writer, designer, developer, translator, or excited human being — we'd love to create GitLab alongside you!

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Meet some of our contributors! Want to share your own story? Learn more

Marvin Karegyeya headshot

I've been able to advance my skills with the contributions I've been making to the GitLab code base. I've grown professionally and of course I've also grown in terms of having better relationships."

— Marvin Karegyeya, GitLab Hero

Akanksha Bhasin headshot

The best part of the GitLab community is the support and the network."

— Akanksha Bhasin, GitLab Hero

Lee Tickett headshot

I value the relationships I’ve built with GitLab team members, many even feel like mentors. They've taught me so much, and I appreciate the time they take out of their day to chat with me, whether it be work related or otherwise. I love the approach and the mentality."

— Lee Tickett, Core Team

Let's Party

Join an existing virtual event or meetup.

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Timeline

It's been 10 years since the first commit to the GitLab open source project.

October 8, 2011

Dmitriy Zaporozhets starts GitLab as an open source project with this commit.

2012

Sid Sijbrandij discovers GitLab and decides to bootstrap a company around it using money he earned from crypto investments. He hires Marin Jankovski as the first GitLab team member, and later invites Dmitriy to join as a co-founder. Hundreds of people sign up for GitLab beta after Sid posts in the Hacker News community.

2013

The first GitLab Summit is held in Novi Sad, Serbia. A highlight is lunch at Marin’s mom's home. The GitLab Summit soon evolves into GitLab's annual team conference, and is called "Contribute" in future iterations.

2014

GitLab Cloud becomes GitLab.com. Soon after, GitLab is incorporated as a limited company on September 10, 2014.

2015

Kamil Trzciński’s unofficial runner becomes official. He began developing it as a way to learn Go and contributed it as an unofficial GitLab project. Sid and Dmitriy love it and offer him a job.

2016

GitLab Source Code Management (SCM) and Continuous Integration (CI) are combined into a single application.

2017

GitLab switches to a Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) for Community Edition contributions. This helps reinforce GitLab's commitment to its stewardship of the open source project by giving developers greater flexibility and portability for their contributions.

2018

GNOME moves to GitLab and sets a precedent for large open source organizations migrating. The Drupal Association, and others, soon follow. The GitLab for Open Source, GitLab for Education, and GitLab for Startups programs are created to offer GitLab's top tier and 50,000 units of compute for free to qualifying organizations and projects.

2019

GitLab holds its first user conference, GitLab Commit, in Brooklyn, New York. Another GitLab Commit is held in London later in the year.

2020

The GitLab Open Source Partners program is launched to collaborate on making GitLab better for all open source communities.

2021

The GitLab community grows to over 2,600 contributors as of July 31, 2021. GitLab participates in Google Summer of Code and Hacktoberfest for the first time. The GitLab for Education Program reaches one million users.

October 8, 2021

GitLab celebrates its 10 year anniversary. Share your favorite memories from "10 years of GitLab".

10 fun facts about GitLab.

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1

Our logo depicts a Tanuki, a Japanese racoon dog. On social media, we use a fox emoji, and we also have a Font Awesome icon that we often use: fa-gitlab.

2

Over 10 people who earned the GitLab MVP award as contributors have ended up working at GitLab Inc.

3

The co-founders, Sid Sijbrandij and Dmitriy Zaporozhets, and GitLab’s first employee, Marin Jankovski, met in real life for the first time at Railsberry, Krakow 2013.

4

GitLab’s company robot, named Beamy, lived in our San Francisco boardroom (which is in Sid’s home in the city).

5

As of July 31, 2021, over ninety people in the wider GitLab community earned the GitLab Hero title for their important contributions.

6

We have over 2,000 web pages in the GitLab handbook to enable our fully remote team to work transparently and collaborate more efficiently across the world.

7

Our tanuki logo has evolved over the years from something that people said looked a little scary, into the lovable icon we have today.

8

As of July 31, 2021, GitLab has over 1,350 team members in over 65 countries with zero company-owned offices.

9

GitLab's Team Member Resource Groups (TMRGs) help to foster diversity, inclusion and belonging within GitLab.

10

The core team, a group of people who represent the wider GitLab community and help GitLab live up to its mission and values, hosted the first "Community Weekend" Hackathon in 2015 where they met virtually to fix bugs and triage issues. Since that first event, GitLab has continued to host quarterly virtual hackathons.

Join In

Help us celebrate

We'll be celebrating GitLab's 10 year anniversary throughout the year and into 2022 — and there are many ways to join the fun!

We encourage you to join a virtual meetup, write a blog post, share your story with us, or just help us amplify the ten year celebrations! #10YearsOfGitLab

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Free Community Programs

We offer our top tier and 50,000 units of compute for free to qualifying open source projects, educational institutions, and startups.

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