firelizzard

I have 13 followers on GitHub. A few are friends from college, the rest I have absolutely no clue why.

Do you use the command line for everything? Do you edit with vim, view diffs with git diff, browse the web with links or lynx?

GUIs are useful tools. I’m happy with VSCode’s git integration. It’s just what I need for basic stuff like staging files and committing. I use the CLI whenever I want to do something like rebasing because I can type that command faster than I can figure out the GUI, but it would be stupid to artificially force myself to use the CLI for everything because of some kind of principal.

I assume you’re implying my confidence is due to having limited competence and thus overestimating my competence? The fact that I have imposter syndrome when I imaging trying to be a professional electrical engineer (despite having a degree) seems counter to your presumed argument.

I can see how systems engineering could fit into that role but the project/program managers I’ve talked to were much more focused on management than engineering

Systems engineering is an established discipline, one you can get a degree in. It’s not just a random term I’m making up. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_engineering

Do you have other regular meetings? I'm at a fully remote company and if we didn't have stand ups I probably barely ever talk to my coworkers via anything more than email and chat.

Part of it is an HTTP/RPC interface, but that's not the party I want to test.

I don’t think you really have a choice TBH. Trying to do something like that sounds like a world of pain, and a bunch of unidiomatic code. If you can’t actually support 4 to 10 languages, maybe you should cut back on which ones you support?

To be clear, the SDKs themselves are hand-written; I'm not trying to do anything fancy there. In terms of designing and writing the SDKs, we can manage that for the 4 we have now. The issue is testing. The main system is a collection of services that are accessed via an API. That API can be accessed directly through function calls, or via HTTP or RPC. Our integration tests interact with the system through that API. The SDKs have a moderate amount of logic so they're not simple HTTP/RPC clients, but maintaining multiple (idiomatic) versions of that logic is not too much of a burden. The issue is that I want a single test corpus that I can use to validate each SDK without having to rewrite that test corpus in each language. Ideally I'd like the integration tests to be that test corpus.

If neither of those approaches works, everything speaks C FFI, and Rust is a modern language that would work well for presenting a C FFI that the other languages can use. You’re probably not hot on the idea of rewriting your Go tests into another language, but I think that’s your only real option then.

I was assuming I'd need to rewrite my tests in Go given that Go's FFI support for anything other than C is not somewhere I want to go again. I have been meaning to learn Rust so I might just do that.

I'm definitely not interested in convincing you to change your mind but I do want to reply to some specific items.

the number of users in groups

The only limitation I can find is that top-level groups on the free plan are limited to 5 users. Granted, there are certainly reasons to keep a group private, but public groups are not limited.

moving some basic free features into premium like protected branches, code owners, issue dependencies, epics, roadmaps

Protected branches are available for all plans. I'm pretty certain the rest of the features you mentioned were never free. You can disagree with that choice, but it is incorrect to say they were moved into premium.

I saw in other comments that you aren't happy with the direction GitLab is going in and feel that they're focusing on business customers at the expense of open source users. Can you expand on that?

The project I am working on joined the GitLab for Open Source program and it was absolutely painless. All we needed to do was submit an application and now we're using Ultimate without paying a cent.

I'm not sure it's what you're referring to, but one of the pain points for me is that open source projects (that don't join the program) no longer have access to lots of free SaaS CI hours. That sucks, but I can't blame them - they had a plague of crypto miners taking advantage of those free CI hours. It's not reasonable to expect them to eat that cost, especially when the open source program is so easy to join.

GitLab already has stellar CI/CD, far superior to GitHub Actions IMO

I’ve been using GitLab for years. I have a GitHub account but at this point I only use it to contribute to other projects.