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Launch HN: GitStart (YC S19) – Remote junior devs working on production PRs

235 points·by hzia·hace 3 años·192 comments

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hzia
·hace 7 meses·discuss
Congrats team! Graphite was basically what GitHub should have been but never was

Huge fans of their work @ GitStart!
hzia
·hace 8 meses·discuss
Most heavy users of python notebooks (including us) have a hate love relationship with it, especially when you add it into git.

Honestly this is worth alone for the fact that there isn't random JSON blobs coming in PR diffs.

I wish more people tried it out instead of complaining about the blog post text.
hzia
·el año pasado·discuss
This is very exciting! Existing data will become a lot more valuable and it brings it one step closer to how we learn as humans!

The downside is that this is going to be extremely expensive, so the data set to conduct RL will need to be curated.
hzia
·hace 2 años·discuss
I agree on the Bell Labs analogy

Most browsers have consolidated over time because we are constantly updating web standards and bar for security is so high. On top of that everything has to be insanely backward compatible

WebGPU is a good example. Implementing that securely in a nightmare
hzia
·hace 2 años·discuss
Majority of revenue base lives on iOS globally (due to being a monopoly in the US)

That's why Apple has higher profits than all other mobile operators combined!
hzia
·hace 2 años·discuss
I think you are drastically overestimating the revenue gain from ad blockers

But I agree that default search with being Google must have heavily blocked competition.

Comparing how much they pay Mozilla and Apple to maintain search, it would be reasonable to estimate Chrome’s implementation to save them $1b a year

But I highly doubt they make any back given > 1k people work on it
hzia
·hace 2 años·discuss
That’s revenue not profits. Majority goes to app devs.

Profits are all that matter
hzia
·hace 2 años·discuss
I think most people do not understand that Google funnels a lot of their profits to make Chrome and Android into OSS.

Youtube may be the only viable company that can come out of Google. Rest will either have to charge a lot of money or die.

And we will be left with an even more profitable ad giant, that sends back all profits to it's share holders.
hzia
·hace 3 años·discuss
That sounds really low. Do you mind sharing where you rent your racks from?
hzia
·hace 3 años·discuss
Thank you so much for that!! I wondered about this as well. Love how above and beyond you guys are going to support other OSS implementations <3
hzia
·hace 3 años·discuss
How do you sign multiple devs on a commit though? Would it be a joint PGP key signed by all keys of all devs that helped with the PR?
hzia
·hace 3 años·discuss
GitStart only takes care of well scoped tickets in backlog and finishes them at the PR stage. There is so much more to do including:

technical architecture, API design, breaking down large projects, infrastructure and so on.

All of the above require senior in-house talent. So we want to become the best place for juniors to grow and enable them to join companies to lead the above initiatives.

I do not see a way where we will reduce the need for senior positions.
hzia
·hace 3 años·discuss
Your advice is spot on, and why we wanted to build a better than the current status quo!

a) we already have a sizeable alumni who have gone through GitStart over time, with many still in touch. We are in works to bring them all together in discord

b) there is no current restriction or even referral feel for both devs and companies to work with each other. The only thing we ask is for devs to either be full time on the platform or work with them directly and pause GitStart

c) good people recommend more good people! And we have a program where as alumni they get free credits for their own companies (over 5 have launched their company and used those free credits)

We currently do not have a referral program for alumni to recommend devs (it is there for currently active devs) but that’s a great idea to roll out!
hzia
·hace 3 años·discuss
I appreciate the candid honestly! Even though we are aiming to become a career accelerator for junior devs, not everyone is going to graduate right away. For some, just a few months of experience is enough but for others it can take years.

But at the end of the day, success for both devs and engineering teams (aka clients) on our platform depend on the PRs shipped. Which is why we focus all of our energy on the PR lifecycle. All key metrics driven from PRs (review cycles, time to merge, merge rate and so on).

By keeping laser focus to complete a PR, both parties win. Which is why we optimize for that first, and on top of that build further ways for junior devs to grow and teams to accelerate their velocity.

So if we need to add more human management to ship better PRs we do that. But later if solving a client need can enable them to write better tickets (which will facilitate better PRs) then we shift our focus to that.
hzia
·hace 3 años·discuss
We already have email+password+verification_link combo for client dashboard, and we are soon bringing it to our developer dashboard soon! (along with a brand new dev focused website)

Unfortunately the developer waiting list is quite long so it may be a while before we get back to you. But we are scaling quickly to fix that later this year.
hzia
·hace 3 años·discuss
How was your experience recruiting and working with dev teams based out of China? And how do you enforce foreign contracts from aboard (or draft local ones with a sub within China?)

We already have customers and a subsidiary based out of Hong Kong, and it will not be a stretch to scale those customers further from devs within China.
hzia
·hace 3 años·discuss
Internally we are expanding ways in which we draft multiple PRs initially when new devs onboard and send the one with the best peer review approval

We could infant send all the draft PRs upstream. And as a senior dev upstream, you review and merge the approach that works best

It would be offensive for most in-house teams to try to give our duplicated work, but universities and bootcamps get students to learn by doing the same thing in parallel anyways
hzia
·hace 3 años·discuss
We enable EOR + BR + MDM setup on the enterprise plan. Plus, MDM is usually gimmicky given most devs for these clients work in a virtual environment anyways (so the code never leaves their infrastructure).

IMO if we fail as a company, it will be far more likely because of inability to deliver high quality PRs instead of inability to get through compliance.
hzia
·hace 3 años·discuss
Quite a few are due to priority changes over time. We are thinking to automatically close PRs when there is no activity for > 14 days.
hzia
·hace 3 años·discuss
Do you think outsourcing (“gets outsourced anyways”) still happens for most tech teams? IMO, just like you mentioned, teams are so scared of outsourcing that this happens less and less.

I agree that this works for well scoped tickets that only depend on the code and testable on a staging environment. Anything outside of that needs in-house devs (or contractors) to get done.