 Okay, story time. When I first heard of GitLab, we had just finished integration with GitHub, and a customer said they wanted to just integrate with GitLab too, and I was like, GitLab, what's that? I took a look at the website and was like, eww, that's an ugly knockoff of GitHub. No thanks. And then I promptly forgot about GitLab. A couple of years later, a product manager that worked for me was excited about this competitor called GitLab. GitLab's got CI now, and their roadmap is public. I didn't really understand what he was excited about, but he was kind of irrationally excited about GitLab. I still ignored it. Within a few months, this PM had raved about GitLab so many times, I figured it deserved a look. So I started digging around, and I was like, damn, GitLab, you grew up. It wasn't just an ugly knockoff of GitHub anymore. First off, it actually looked nice. It had more features than GitHub. Wait, what happened here? Oh, I see. You joined Y Combinator. There's a real company behind it now, and they're crushing it, growing incredibly fast. What the heck? And then, of course, I found the company Hembook. Oh my god, my mind was blown. It was only a fraction of the size it is now, but even then, the mission, the values, the roadmap, it was all out there in the open. Oh, and it was a remote-first company. It became a remote later, a bit later on, but it was still at that point. The headquarters actually had maybe three people working in it. But even though I lived in the Bay Area, I hated commuting into San Francisco. So I reached out to Yob and had a chat with Sid and realized that not only was the company already doing well, there's even more ambition behind it. So I started opening up about all the things I wanted to do in the developer space. And Sid and I were so shockingly on the same page. Everything I had wanted to do in previous companies but ran into a wall. While at GitLab, there was no wall. It wasn't confined to source code management. It already had strong CI and was poised to head straight into CD. So spoiler alert, I joined the company. Sid, to his credit, told me to take it easy for the first few weeks and get to know the team. Just absorb, soak it all in. But after about two weeks, I had written up a complete vision for CI-CD at GitLab, telling every one of the things that I'd ever dreamed of doing before. But for the first time, seeing that maybe, just maybe, this company would pull it off. So we implemented environments, and deployments, and pipelines, and slowly worked through the vision picking off major chunks of the developer workflow. Well, I say slowly, but that's a lie. We were knocking out major features at a furious pace, iterating faster than I knew possible, and I was proud of my previous teams and their abilities to iterate, but this was different. Things that another company might take a year to even start, we were kicking out in months. It was awesome. I'm so proud of what the team accomplished. Then about a year ago, we had covered so much of this vision for CI-CD. We were starting to run into another wall. See, I had always thought that as a developer, you really needed to cover this entire workflow from idea to production, and once it's in production, you'd keep watch on it in case any code changes caused a production problem. But true operations, well, that was on the other side of the wall. We were only making things for developers. It was a developer tool. Operations is clearly a separate thing. Or is it? Maybe this wall isn't a wall at all. Maybe it's imaginary, and just like Neo swallowing the red pill, my eyes opened and I saw that there was no wall, and with that, GitLab was moving into DevOps. Then a month or two, Sid and I and others had crafted a vision for 2018 where GitLab goes beyond dev into DevOps, but not just any DevOps, complete DevOps, where we cover every important part of the software development lifecycle with a single application. Because did I mention GitLab is ambitious? To cover something this big, we knew we'd have to go seriously into breadth over depth territory. For a user experience-minded PM, this is uncomfortable, shipping a lot of MVCs or minimum viable changes that amount to a foundation or base, or scaffolding, if you will. They're pretty bare boned. But by getting the entire vision out there, people would understand internally and externally. Everyone would know where we're going, and the community can help flesh out the rest. And the thing is, it's working. It's really resonating with prospects. When they hear our vision, customers' eyes light up. They love our vision. Sometimes they're skeptical, but they want it to come true. This product, this entire scope of complete DevOps, this is what I've always wanted as a developer. I didn't want to have to make it, but I wanted it to exist. But no other company could do this. I mean, it's not like they don't have enough resources or money or people to pull it off, but they didn't have enough ambition, drive, determination, whatever. They all put up imaginary walls. At GitLab, there is no wall. Of course we can do this, so we have an obligation to do this. This product needs to exist. Many people could have done it, but we're the only ones willing to accept the low level of shame inherent in iterating so quickly. We're the only ones who have the guts to do this. There is no wall. We tore down the wall between version control and CI. We're tearing down the walls between Dev and Ops. As a side note, at one point, Sid said, not to worry, we'll get complete DevOps out there, and then we can take time to build in the depth. I replied, yeah, right. We'll do DevSecOps and add even more scope. Well, that turned out not to be true. He didn't wait until next year. Within two months, Sid realized security was important, and pretty soon we were really going after Dev and Ops and Biz and Sec. So if you think there is a magic wall around DevOps, think again. There is no wall. Who's next? Designers, product managers, executives? Yeah, they're all fair game. Remember, our mission is everyone can contribute. We're building on strengths and going through an ever-expanding software development lifecycle, but there are no limits. There is no wall. And the funny thing is about imaginary walls is that once you're on the other side, you wonder what you were afraid of. There is no wall.