marketing VS toolbox

GitLab team member here. Thanks for flagging.

Our web team is working to resolve this issue here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/digital-experience/b...

> Having a web-based IDE is great for newcomers and will work on cheap Chromebooks or iPads

Good call, thanks. GitLab team member here.

From my experience as GitLab trainer in my past job, a web frontend to edit files hides the complexity of Git on the CLI, and helps with the "5 min success" to get going and learning. This can help with team member onboarding, as well as OSS projects looking for contributors.

Combined with CI/CD pipeline feedback in the same interface, without context switches, it makes the learning story easier to follow too.

The first workshops to get started with GitLab CI/CD from 2 years ago, are linked in the documentation, and use the Web IDE. [0] Seen great learning curves from the wider community :-) Taking a note to create a new workshop with the new IDE in the future. [1]

[0] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/quick_start/

[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/corporate_marketing/...

Thank you for the great thoughts :)

> And maybe only cache the downloads on the main branch.

$CI_COMMIT_REF_SLUG resolves into the branch when executed in a pipeline. Using it as value for the cache key, Git branches (and related MRs) use different caches. It can be one way to avoid collision but requires more storage with multiple caches. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/variables/predefined_variables...

In general, I agree, the more caches and parallel execution you add, the more complex and error prone it can get. Simulating a pipeline with runtime requirements like network & caches needs its own "staging" env for developing pipelines. That's a scenario not many have, or might be willing to assign resources onto. Static simulation where you predict the building blocks from the yaml config, is something GitLab's pipeline authoring team is working on in https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/6498

And it is also a matter of insights and observability - the critical path in the pipeline has a long max duration, where do you start analysing and how do you prevent this scenario from happening again. Monitoring with the GitLb CI Pipeline Exporter for Prometheus is great, another way of looking into CI/CD pipelines can be tracing.

CI/CD Tracing with OpenTelemetry is discussed in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/338943 to learn about user experiences, and define the next steps. Imho a very hot topic, seeing more awareness for metrics and traces from everyone. Like, seeing the full trace for pipeline from start to end with different spans inside, and learning that the container image pull takes a long time. That can be the entry point into deeper analysis.

Another idea is to make app instrumentation easier for developers, providing tips for e.g. adding /metrics as an http endpoint using Prometheus and OpenTelemetry client libraries. That way you not only see the CI/CD infrastructure & pipelines, but also user side application performance monitoring and beyond in distributed environments. I'm collecting ideas for blog posts in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/corporate_marketing/...

For someone starting with pipeline efficiency tasks, I'd recommend setting a goal - like shown in the blog post X minutes down to Y - and then start with analysing to get an idea about the blocking parts. Evaluate and test solutions for each part, e.g. a terraform apply might depend on AWS APIs, whereas a Docker pull could be switched to use the Dependency proxy in GitLab for caching.

Each environment has different requirements - collect helpful resources from howtos, blog posts, docs, HN threads, etc. and also ask the community about their experience. https://forum.gitlab.com/ is a good spot too. Recommend to create an example project highlighting the pipeline, and allowing everyone to fork, analyse, add suggestions.

Good morning HN. I am the DRI (directly responsible individual) for about.gitlab.com and I have created this issue to audit our trackers, cookies, and other data collection on the marketing website https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/inbound-marketing/ma...

Our product does not include the tracking that is used on the marketing site.

Hi,

> This was not a poor accident by a single employee. It's noble that the author tries to take all the blame on himself, but honestly, I feel like that is a moment where a leader has to step in and accept their mistake and not let a small trooper eat all the bullets.

The issues you have found are all assigned to me, or I created them. My task is to create blog posts, some of which being a hackathon and challenge. The KPI are impressions, other metrics are hard to measure. As a Developer Evangelist, I often need to learn new technologies, or dive into unknown areas connecting the dots.

You can learn more about our focus areas in our handbook: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati...

I'm focussing on the Ops side, with a backend development background in the past 15 years. I was once a maintainer of an OSS monitoring project called Icinga, a Nagios fork back then. I decided to take on a new journey with becoming a Developer Evangelist in March 2020 (you can learn more on my website https://dnsmichi.at/about/ in case you're interested).

That being said, I've found it interesting to learn about web apps and their deployment, and dive into new things. Never having found a use case for trying Heroku, March brought up one: There was a Twitter theme of "Everyone is building a better Heroku" - https://twitter.com/adamhjk/status/1369704730218299392?s=27

From there, I thought of learning Heroku while comparing it with the 5 minute production app. I underestimated the challenge of creating a web app with a persistent backend, and decided to stick with the simple battleships demo I had initially found.

This state of the blog post felt good enough for me, and I did not include the persistent backend just yet, but moved it into a separate blog post. This is feedback I got during the review.

Turns out that this decision was wrong, next to other negative raw sentiments I had added in the blog post.

You can try to convince that it is not my fault, and I will convince you - it is, and I am standing up for it. Public and transparent.

I know we all get better from making mistakes. The lesson I learned today helped me improve a talk I gave at a meetup in my evening, it added technical insights as well as helped with the story line. That's the tracking issue: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/corporate_marketing/...

We will continue to iterate, and have a retrospective on what we can improve from the lessons learned today. Thanks for your feedback.

The team has both made a ton of effort switching off their proprietary Skia based rendering tech and adopting standard Wayland, and has put forward huge effort to making running incredibly well integrated real Linux containers just work.

The headline is true. ChromeOS is Linux with Google’s desktop environment. But it obfuscates the details. It's a damned by omission statement. It has some really good sauce to help you not notice often, but it's not at all a Linux desktop environment one can regularly use. You can do a lot of Linux desktop-y things but only through well crafted special unique wrapped processes that mostly but not fully help mock & emulate a regular Linux desktop. Even though it now runs Wayland, the apps you want to run will have atypical intermediates up the wazoo.

And no one else uses any of this tech. ChromiumOs has so much interesting container tech, does such an interesting job making containers think they have a regular Linux / FreeDesktop environment. It's far far far far deeper virtualization than for example https://github.com/containers/toolbox . But you know what? Google has made zero effort to get these pieces adopted elsewhere. It's open source but not intended for use outside Chromium/ChromeOS. I respect & think ChromeOS is a quite viable Linux, and it's so much closer to the metal & more interesting, amazing tech, but my gods Microsoft has gone 300x further to establish wsl2 as a sustainable community effort folks could use & target, in a way that ChromiumOS has done nothing about.

It's sad how Google has transformed from a company that appreciated & worked with ecosystems, that drove things collectively forward, into an individual player that does their own things & delivers from on high. ChromiumOS is such an incredible effort, but it's so internernally drive & focused, and it's hard to believe in such a wildcat effort, even though it's so so good. It keeps coming into better alignment with Linux Desktop actual, but via shims and emulations that no one else cares about or which seems marketed elsewhere. And that inward focus makes the whole effort both so exceptional & promising, but suspect. Such a different nearby but alternative & separately governed universe. ChromiumOS/ChromeOS do excellent at faking being a Linux desktop, and wonderfully have increasingly drawn more strength from that universe, but are still wholly their own very distinct very separate very controller other space. In many ways that's great, secure, good, and miraculously transparently done. But it's still hard to really trust, being such a weird alien impostor, faking so much for end user apps, and there's tension in believing ChromeOS will keep straddling the rift in pro-user manifestations forever.

I'm really, really happy with my current setup of Fedora immutable + toolbox [0]. This tool lets you create containers that are fully integrated with the system, so you have acces to the entire Fedora repos, can run graphical apps, etc. while still having everything inside a container in your home directory. That means no Flatpak required. Highly recommended.

[0] https://containertoolbx.org

Seems like toolbox is also in this space; https://github.com/containers/toolbox

With Silverblue the core repos are very similar to what you'd have on regular Fedora. With more of a philosophical shift about where you're supposed to install things from. The idea being that the base OS is immutable and you keep it fairly minimal - even though you are technically free to install any of Fedora packages to it. And then you install user applications through Flatpak and toolbx. Where these more user space focussed applications are installed to your home directory and are sandboxed away from actual access to your OS. With iOS/Android style application permissions like "Give app permission to access camera" and "Give app permission to modify files in home directory". Allowing you even further customise the sandboxing of applications. Do you really want that app to have access to your microphone?

I'd probably try running it on the host system first. If you want to use your nvidia gpu inside toolbox, you would indeed need to install the drivers in the container: https://github.com/containers/toolbox/issues/116

Use toolbox on CentOS or Ubuntu if you want a Fedora environment with more up to date tools: https://containertoolbx.org/