A long while ago, GitLab was one of the best git servers with a lot of advanced capabilities, and they grew the feature set ever since. Back in the day, GitLab provided unlimited users compared to 3 users limit in GitHub. For us, this was a life saver, as we are working as part-time organization, which contains both developers and non-developers, at our best, we reached 15 users, spanning over product, web, mobile and other services. So, instead of having the 15 users in GitHub with full price of users for half of us coding, and working like 3 hours a day tops, and 5 days a week, this was an overkill. So, GitLab was the best one to choose at that time.

When Microsoft acquired GitHub, I was skeptical, I though they will ruin the platform (to some degree), and for a while there was no noticeable difference. Well, until they made the service free by lifting the 3-user limit. It did not effect us for a while, as we were using GitLab extensively. Our usages was mainly version control and nothing else, one time for one project, we tried to set up a CI\CD, our first one ever. Even thought we discarded that thought, it was a good experience. We heavily relay on version-control-based features, like forking and branching, tags and milestones, and pull/merge requests but nothing fancy.

When the bad time stormed us for the first time, when GitLab first announced the price change and the 5-user limit per namespace, we planned our migration to GitHub, it was in a critical time, and the situation was dire. So, we decided to breakdown the teams, we were like 8~10 members at that time, and so, we broke the team into 3 smaller teams. One for frontend web, one for backend, and one for mobile. We had 2 people in common in all 3 for redundancy and availability, as we are using other services that require some people to handle the integrations and usages of the other platforms, namely Netlify, CloudFlare, and Laravel Forge. So it worked out well, despite the quick changes.

When another round of price increase came, it killed GitLab in my eyes. The one who stood for open source and challenged GitHub at sometime, is now only seeking revenue at all costs. It does not effect us in any other way apart from splitting the team into 5-or-less members in a namespace, so it does not bring any new damage to us. But morally, we started to favor GitHub over self-hosted GitLab, as we don't know how bad will GitLab turn. In the first round, the price was way too high, with the second, it was just an overkill. So, I thinking GitLab is seeking its death by its own hands, and we will probably jump ships to GitHub or any suitable service when the times comes.

I use GitHub as my primary code hosting, collaboration and CI/CD platform, as well as for my portfolio.

The reasons against GitHub:

• No fine-grained Permissions possible. Write-only for whole repo only. The fuck?. Not only will this potentially end in a disaster, it already ended up causing the necessity for every big multi-maintainer project to have an maybe-even-own-written GitHub App that allows specified users to do a specified set of things by posting comments that are structured as commands.
• GitHub Packages Size Limit
• [Addendum 2022/07] GitHub Actions is great in general, but it lacks some features in the long run / when you want to get more advanced. (e.g. early-exiting the job, getting the job or workflow id in a job, job-level if's for matrix'ed jobs). But!: You are not locked-in to use GitHub CI. GitHub integrates and shows the results of other CI systems too!

The reasons for GitHub are rather simple and more pronounced:

• Everyone, even non-Developers, know how to use GitHub.
• Everyone has an Account on GitHub.
• GitHub Actions are great and completely FREE (I repeat: free, unlimited access to great automated virtual machines that can do anything on any action trigger).
• GitHub Action runners are actual virtual machines (even windows/macos possible) and not just some hacky docker containers, allowing you to really do anything.
• The API and Documentation is top notch.

We chose github + github actions in order to manage the code versioning and the CI on the same software. Furthermore, while it is not that much, I believe that for a large team it is considerably cheaper to have one github subscription instead of a git subscription and a CI/CD software subscription.

GitHub provides great user experience ans most developers are familiar with it. There is also an attractive pricing model for those who already have a Visual Studio subscription.

We also don't like the "everything in one tool" approach from GitHub as there are better tools for build system, package registries, etc. on the market.

We chose GitHub for version control hosting because of its high-quality and performant pull request user interface, as well as GitHub Actions.

We also selected GitHub as our first OAuth2 authorization provider because of its large community, high-quality documentation, and sophisticated App framework for granular permission management and event notifications.

Do you have a K8s cluster and you want to deploy some services to it? Gitlab Auto Devops is key to achieve this without breaking a sweat.

We deploy Go services to our K8S clusters with warp speed thanks to Gitlab and it's Auto Devops pipeline.

I haven't seen tooling like this in any other git cloud provider.

Both of us are far more familiar with GitHub than Gitlab, and so for our first big project together decided to go with what we know here instead of figuring out something new (there are so many new things we need to figure out, might as well reduce the number of optionally new things, lol). We aren't currently taking advantage of GitHub Actions or very many other built-in features (besides Dependabot) but luckily it integrates very well with the other services we're using.

I first used BitBucket because it had private repo's, and it didn't disappoint me. Also with the smooth integration of Jira, the decision to use BitBucket as a full application maintenance service was as easy as 1, 2, 3.

I honestly love BitBucket, by the looks, by the UI, and the smooth integration with Tower.

Do you review your Pull/Merge Request before assigning Reviewers?

If you work in a team opening a Pull Request (or Merge Request) looks appropriate. However, have you ever thought about opening a Pull/Merge Request when working by yourself? Here's a checklist of things you can review in your own:

• Pick the correct target branch
• Make Drafts explicit
• Name things properly
• Ask help for tools
• Remove the noise
• Fetch necessary data
• Understand Mergeability
• Pass the message
• Add screenshots
• Be found in the future
• Comment inline in your changes

Read the blog post for more detailed explanation for each item :D

What else do you review before asking for code review?

Using an inclusive language is crucial for fostering a diverse culture. Git has changed the naming conventions to be more language-inclusive, and so you should change. Our development tools, like GitHub and GitLab, already supports the change.

SourceLevel deals very nicely with repositories that changed the master branch to a more appropriate word. Besides, you can use the grep linter the look for exclusive terms contained in the source code.

As the inclusive language gap may happen in other aspects of our lives, have you already thought about them?