Petes Linkedin Blog

Since the introduction of System R in 1974, relational databases in general, and SQL databases in particular, have risen to become the dominant approach to data persistence in the industry, and have maintained that dominance despite various significant challengers. Though some have rumored the death and decline of traditional relational databases, PostgreSQL has turned out to be an improvement on its predecessors, as well as its supposed successors. In fact, the open-source MySQL database was so ubiquitous that it became part of the eponymous LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl) that dominated early web development. The one big exception to this trend is OLAP, where specialized techniques that can drastically improve the performance of certain workloads have met with use-cases that actually require these techniques, with new contenders such as Clickhouse enabling qualitatively different approaches to analytics. One size does not fit all As often happens when a technology become...

Being part of the GitLab collective is an opportunity to learn first hand about the challenges the community using the DevOps Platform is facing. As a Collective Member logging between 2-3 times a week in StackOverflow reading the questions and discussion posted about GitLab and manually sorting them by 'Recent Activity', 'Trending' and using Dates, I asked myself: how can we leverage this wealth of data and discover feedback, while finding the most frequent topics where the community has questions? This would be an opportunity to get a quick overview of topics where the community regularly needs help; this would also make it easier for us to create relevant content for them. Manually sorting and extracting the text of each question wouldn’t be sustainable, so creating an automated way would be the most efficient way to proceed. Experimenting with data-oriented content creation Finding out what the community is working on, and what they need help with while using Gi...

Accelerating DevOps adoption is core to achieving our mission of allowing everyone to contribute. DevOps enables contribution and collaboration between disparate and previously siloed teams. In fact, DevOps is so central to GitLab that we have incorporated the DevOps infinity loop into our logo. I’m excited to share our new logo and look with you. Building The One DevOps Platform DevOps has come a long way since GitLab was incorporated in 2014. And DevOps strategies are continuing to evolve. For some companies, each team selects their own DevOps tools, which causes problems when teams try to collaborate. For other companies, they select a set of preferred tools. But then they still require a lot of custom work to integrate DevOps point solutions together into a “Do It Yourself DevOps” solution. The more point solutions that are digitally duct taped together, the harder it is to integrate and maintain them all. And that’s why I’m proud that GitLab allows companies to do away with the...

A key to GitLab’s success is our vast community of advocates. Here at GitLab, we call these active contributors "GitLab Heroes" . Each hero contributes to GitLab in numerous ways, including elevating releases, sharing best practices, speaking at events, and more.  Niklas van Schrick , who currently works as a Developer trainee, has been an active GitLab Hero since November 2021.  Niklas upholds the GitLab values , especially for transparency, by sharing his trials and discoveries with self-hosted instances. We all can learn from each other’s mistakes, which leads to collaborating to improve processes and build a better developer experience. His journey to becoming a GitLab hero is detailed below. A difficult beginning Niklas van Schrick: Every developer has to start somewhere. My journey started in May 2019 with Java and Minecraft. While development in Minecraft is great for fast results, based on my experience it’s not the best idea for a beginner. It introduces th...

Start-ups and small or medium-sized businesses (SMBs) face plenty of challenges, but several of those hurdles can be eased by adopting a DevOps platform . A DevOps platform can help not only address the issue at hand but the benefits can spread across the company, helping it grow in a competitive and unpredictable market . The United States alone is home to 32.5 million small businesses, making up 99.9 percent of all companies in the country, according to a 2021 report from the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy . And all of these companies have a tough road to travel – so tough that 20 percent of U.S. small businesses fail within the first year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics . By the end of the fifth year, about 50 percent are shuttered. Stressed with common problems like worker overload, finding time for collaboration, and meeting customer and market needs, smaller businesses are under a lot of pressure. With SMBs and small or medium-sized enterpr...

Even if you’re totally happy in your current position, it pays to keep an eye on your DevOps career path and learn about emerging roles, especially given the way the DevOps space evolves so rapidly . For example, you might be wondering about the role of site reliability engineer (SRE) as opposed to DevOps engineer (and the totally new position called DevOps platform engineer, more on that later). These are all engineering positions requiring tech expertise and coding chops, but they play distinct roles on the DevOps team. Here’s what you need to know: SRE: a seasoned role As the title suggests, at a high level, SREs focus primarily on reliability, solving operational, scale, and uptime problems. In 2003, Google originated the SRE role to safeguard the uptime of its site, but it has evolved considerably since the advent of cloud-native applications and platforms. Today, SREs concentrate on minimizing the frequency and impact of failures that can impact the overall reliability of a c...

Today, we are excited to announce the release of GitLab 14.10 with Compliance report individual violation reporting , a UI for streaming audit events , GitLab Runner operator for Kubernetes , escalating manually created incidents and much more! These are just a few highlights from the 25+ improvements in this release. Read on to check out all of the great updates below. To preview what's coming in next month’s release, check out our Upcoming Releases page , which includes our 15.0 release kickoff video. This month's Most Valuable Person ( MVP ) is Jeremy Wu Jeremy added a user interface for streaming audit events to GitLab that provides an easy way for users, including non-technical users, to get started with streaming audit events, rather than needing to use the API. Thanks to this contribution, users can now easily add and remove streaming audit event destinations as well as see the list of existing streaming audit event destinations. Great work! Thank you, Jere...