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• GitLab's Master Plan and conversational development |
• Recent controversy around removing and reposting security research data on GitHub and GitLab |
• Progress on executing the Master Plan, with 80% of envisioned features now in the product |
• Discussion of online IDEs and whether they are a good fit for GitLab |
• Thoughts on container schedulers and dev environments being similar to production environments |
• Groot's research on vulnerable servers caused GitLab to initially remove the list |
• The decision to remove the list was later reversed after considering the interests of users and server owners |
• The publication of the list led to 650 servers being fixed, showing that transparency can be effective in prompting action |
• Sid Sijbrandij discusses the complexities of responsible disclosure policies and the gray areas that can arise |
• He emphasizes the importance of having a unified voice as a company, but also values individual expression and open conversation |
• The interview concludes with a discussion about GitLab's presence at OSCON and their support for conferences and open-source projects |
• Partnership with O'Reilly for OSCON London 2016 |
• Upcoming event: OSCON 2017 in Austin, Texas |
• Discount code for OSCON 2017: "changelog20" for 20% off registration |
**Jerod Santo:** \[00:31\] Welcome to our first Spotlight series recorded at OSCON London 2016. I'm Jerod Santo, managing editor of Changelog. Sid Sijbrandij, the CEO of GitLab, was on the Changelog recently, discussing GitLab's Master Plan and a new style of development they call "conversational development." |
I saw down with Sid at OSCON to see how they're doing executing that plan, and we also discussed the recent controversy around GitLab and the removal and subsequent reposting of security research data. I think you'll enjoy hearing how Sid turns everything into an opportunity as much as I did. Take a listen. |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** You have a nice setup here. This is great. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it's pretty cool, right? We had a good turnout... The hardest part about doing these things is getting people to actually sit down. Because certain people are intimidated or they have no idea what the Changelog is... |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** I love the Changelog. I got so many positive reactions due to the last podcast, it's just insane. It's the most responses to a media thing ever. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's awesome. |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** There's people that applied to the company because of that podcast. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's really cool. I think you did very well on it, and you guys have a lot to say at GitLab, so I think that resonated very well with our listeners. We're always excited when -- you know, listen counts are one thing, but when people actually do things based on the shows that we put on, that's pretty ... |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah. The EFF, that was my first donation ever. |
**Jerod Santo:** Was it? |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** I printed it out. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Yeah, be proud about it. So when we had you on the show, we were talking about your Master Plan and conversational development, which is a very interesting thing and I feel like it's kind of catching on... It's kind of like slapping a name on something we were already doing, which is smart. ... |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yes, trying to brand whatever we see happening already. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, which is a smart business move I think for GitLab, and also helpful, because we were kind of already doing this, and now we can call it something, which is always nice. |
Since then, you guys have had a release. Tell me about the big release. |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** We had a big release, but the most important thing is that we started executing on what we showed. We revealed the Master Plan and we showed this montage of how things should work, and it really energized us. We said, "Okay, what we're gonna do every day for half an hour - we're gonna get gather thi... |
Lots of people have been working really hard to make it a reality. Now we're basically a month later, and we had two weeks of just making little improvements every day, and 80% of what we envisioned is there. It's not yet all shipped, but it's in the product. |
Yesterday I gave a demo here. We were sitting opposite the booth of Red Hat, the OpenShift booth, we installed GitLab on OpenShift and then we demo-ed ChatOps to create an issue training issue open up a coding environment - so you press a button, you get a terminal in your container... |
**Jerod Santo:** Nice... |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** \[04:01\] ...doing the CI, it auto scales on the container scheduler, doing CD and seeing it in cycle analytics... And I can demo that with a plain vanilla OpenShift installation within 20 minutes. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's pretty cool. That had to feel pretty good. |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** It felt really good, and we kind of surprised ourselves how fast we're making progress. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's awesome. |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** The only thing we're still thinking about is the online IDE, and what's giving us pause is that people seem really attached to their editors, so where first we thought it's gonna be something in the browser, now I'm thinking like, "I don't wanna be the one that tells people to give up TextMate or Su... |
**Jerod Santo:** That's a decent value. Remember Heroku started off as an online editor... Do you remember that? And they were way early on it, and they had like this whole integrated environment in the web; that was probably ten years ago now. They moved away from it... I think the web wasn't quite ready for that kind... |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yes, so GitLab has an editor; it's not a development environment, it's just editing the file it's just editing the file. There are so many awesome solutions for online editors... like coding has a great product and we're working to integrate with them even closer. There's Codenvy, there's Cloud9 (aw... |
It's kind of annoying to have to boot up an entire Elasticsearch cluster to properly test my dev environment. It used to be that you just had parity between your pre-production environment and your production environment, but I think with container schedulers we should go all the way. We should go "Your dev environment... |
So you want that in the cloud, but I'm not sure you want the editor there. It's super hard to do, and if you get really down to it, that online editor should do stuff like autocomplete -- it's super hard to do. Codenvy has done a great job with Eclipse Che. It's like an API to do those look-ahead things, because then y... |
We think that's hard to do, and we're into the boring solutions business, so we think "Why not dump it down?" It's a file editor. We just get the files out to your editor and do that, but have all the stuff running back on that container scheduler. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[07:53\] Switching topics a little bit, you were recently in the news - I'm using air quotes, because it's like Hacker News, basically - not for a feature release, but for a bit of a controversy around some scientific research that was published on GitHub and GitLab, and you guys took it down, and the... |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** Yeah, of course. So Saturday morning I woke up and I saw a lot of chat going on in our internal chat channels... Like, "Oh, people don't seem to be very happy about our decision", and I looked at what it was, and it was a guy called Willem de Groot that published a research, and he disclosed over a ... |
My initial reaction was, "Of course we removed that. You shouldn't disclose that to the internet first. You should disclose it to the people that have the affected server and give them time to patch." But two strange things... I know this guy, he runs an internet hosting provider in the Netherlands called Byte - really... |
But if you'd go there and you leave your credit card details, those details will get skimmed because these servers were rooted and had malware on them. So it was more complicated. |
We looked into it and we said, "Okay, what way to have here? The interest of those owners, that they get time to figure out what's going on and not have reputational damage? There will be root codes so it will be easy for another person to add additional malware... Or the interest of the users, that should be protected... |
It's not so likely that everyone will add this list of servers to their etc hosts file or something... but by publishing it, they're putting more pressure on these people to fix their servers, and that's what started happening. 650 servers were fixed since publishing the files with names, so there was an acceleration i... |
So we reversed the decision... The first thing, I give Willem a call, apologize that we took his list down. He was kind enough to walk over somewhere where he had internet access and tweeted about it, and we did a small blog post, and that was well received. It turned into number one on Hacker News, and someone in the ... |
**Jerod Santo:** You were surprised by that level of praise from that action, or...? Maybe it was just refreshing to see... |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** I was very happy to see it... What you're afraid is that you're correct, but people will only notice your initial takedown and not the reversal, so I was happy that that also got visibility. |
**Jerod Santo:** The initial takedown - was it automated, or it was a decision one of your employees made? |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** No, it was a decision that we talked about internally, and we made that decision. We just thought this is a responsible disclosure issue, and there are clear policies about that. We subscribe to responsible disclosure, so if people are not doing that, we're not going to facilitate it. |
**Jerod Santo:** Was this something that you foresaw when you started GitLab? You wanna be spending your days making sales or making the product better, forwarding the thing, but now you're dealing with controversies around something other people were doing; you didn't ask for this kind of... Did you know this was gonn... |
**Sid Sijbrandij:** \[12:02\] Yeah, if you're gonna run a dotcom for content hosting - and we have now even GitLab Pages, where you can use any static site generator and host your site - you're gonna have people hosting stuff that will be controversial, and there are no clear guidelines. Some things are very clearly no... |
**Jerod Santo:** Did you track the -- this is somewhat related and you'll see why in a second... Did you track the story around the Dash developer in the App Store recently, how he was taken out of the App Store because he had a linked account that had some fraudulent reviews? Dash is a great is a great application, an... |
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2017 Spotlight Transcripts
Complete transcripts from the 2017 episodes of the Spotlight podcast.
Generated from this GitHub repository.
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