The selfhosted version has been getting heavier and heavier. Reluctant to call it bloat because it does seem to be features that conceivable someone needs but idk about their direction of travel
TLDR; don't use their SaaS offering, but probably better, yes, though who knows for how long.
I don't use their SaaS offering, but I've been using the self-hosted versions (mostly in CE flavours, but occasionally paid) since the days of the weird black and white fox, when gitlab looked very bootstrap-y. (The logo in question for the curious, but you can't unsee it: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Gitlab_l... )
Anyway, since LLMs for coding became a thing, coupled with the realities of running a business post-IPO, it's been a slow-ish downward trend for the self-hoster, as their offering gets more and more bloat that's likely easier to manage at scale for Gitlab, but stands in stark contrast to what it once was.
Little things are pilling up; components left for dead (we now have both TODO - which is an abysmal mess, and "assigned work items" - WHY?!), issue boards that remain messy, advertisements creeping into the CE version, increasingly wild hardware requirements... and some recent changes to their documentation that strike me as a dark pattern; very much a recognition that either you're an enterprise running your own paid GitLab, with some kind of support, or you're a SaaS user and don't GAF about the ops docs.
The transition to websockets was annoying. Mostly because it kinda-doesn't work and there's no decent polling fallback, which results in time wasted hitting refresh, in 2026, when everything worked fine from 201x-2025.
I've kept my eye out for alternatives, but Gitlab's CI/CD, and the self hosted runners, is still my preferred flavour hands down and continues to be the reason I stick around.
Overall, it's a much slower decline, but like all stock-market-centric companies, you can feel the writing on the wall. Nevertheless, we're in the middle of a Gitlab migration from one cloud provider to anther because we still haven't found something better. :/
Just to note, I made the site to interview authors and get their 5 favorite books on something they are passionate about. And I promote their book alongside the list to help them bump into readers. Authors generally just want to share something they are passionate about; it isn't about money, as nobody is writing a book to make money.
ya, there were a bunch of trade routes along this path to all the different regions/cities. We just named the entire concept the "Silk Road" in the 1800s (it was coined in 1877 by Ferdinand von Richthofen).
"While engaged in a survey of China, the baron was charged with dreaming up a route for a railway linking Berlin to Beijing. This he named die Seidenstrassen, the Silk Roads. It was not until 1938 that the term Silk Road appeared in English, as the title of a popular book by a Nazi-sympathising Swedish explorer, Sven Hedin."
Great list by an absolute expert on the subject :)
I'm hoping to do the Silk Route by bike in the next couple of years. TAD Global Cycling puts together yearly runs, and it looks amazing: https://tdaglobalcycling.com/silk-route
I traveled some of the countries along the way last year, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan (by hiking and offroad vehicles). The landscape is beautiful, but be very prepared to survive in the scorching sun and dust in the desert for days without any option to resupply food and water. We met some solo cyclists along the way, I have great respect for those individuals. For example, this is how the main road looks like in some parts of Tajikistan: https://i.imgur.com/MlZauBn.jpeg
The traffic on these roads consists mostly of Chinese trucks and an occasional crazy traveler like us. Note how a secondary track emerged along the side of the main road because the original one became so filled with potholes.
"be very prepared to survive in the scorching sun and dust in the desert for days without any option to resupply food and water"
I have done Central Asia from Europe to China by bike twice, most recently 2024. Absolutely no problem with resupplying food and water daily. There are food stops and railway-worker infrastructure in the Kazakh and Uzbek deserts. And while Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan have a lot of wild mountain beauty, they are still inhabited. Indeed, local families earn some money by catering to cyclists.
The nice thing about going with a group is that it comes with a support vehicle and water/food/bag carrying. Doing it on my own would be about 10x more intense in terms of prep, I think. I've watched a few biking videos where they started getting close to the edge on water and had to ask random houses they finally found.
Our family doesn't mind a long jolly, one of my favourites (that someone else did) was into the more restricted bits of Papua: Cannibals & Crampons (2001)
In 2001, two British ex army officers set out to climb the unscaled face of Mandela--a remote mountain rising 15,400 ft. above the jungles of New Guinea. This is the extraordinary story of their trek through some of the world's most unexplored terrain.
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