Chapter 1: What inspired Sid Sijbrandij to start Kilo Code?
Welcome to the ChangeLog, where we have deep technical conversations with the hackers, leaders, and innovators of the software world. I'm Jared Santo. On this episode, Adam and I are joined by Sid Sabrandage, founder of GitLab, who led the all-in-one coding platform all the way to IPO. In late 2022, Sid discovered that he had bone cancer.
Chapter 2: How did Sid's cancer diagnosis impact his professional journey?
That started a journey he's been on ever since, a journey that he shares with us in detail. Along the way, Sid continued founding companies, including KiloCode,
an all-in-one agentic engineering platform which he also tells us all about but first a big thank you to our partners at fly.io the platform for devs who just want to ship build fast run any code fearlessly at fly.io okay since the brandage back on the changelog let's do it
Well, friends, I'm here again with a good friend of mine, Kyle Galbraith, co-founder and CEO of depot.dev. Slow builds suck. Depot knows it.
Chapter 3: What challenges did Sid face while leading GitLab to IPO?
Kyle, tell me, how do you go about making builds faster? What's the secret?
When it comes to optimizing build times to drive build times to zero, you really have to take a step back and think about the core components that make up a build. You have your CPUs, you have your networks, you have your disks. All of that comes into play when you're talking about reducing build time.
Chapter 4: What is Kilo Code and how does it differ from GitLab?
And so some of the things that we do at Depot, we're always running on the latest generation for ARM CPUs and AMD CPUs from Amazon. Those in general are anywhere between 30% and 40% faster than GitHub's own hosted runners. And then we do a lot of cache tricks, both for way back in the early days when we first started Depot. focused on container image builds.
But now we're doing the same types of cache tricks inside of GitHub Actions, where we essentially multiplex uploads and downloads of GitHub Actions cache inside of our runners so that we're going directly to blob storage with as high of throughput as humanly possible.
Chapter 5: How does Sid balance his health journey with multiple business ventures?
We do other things inside of a GitHub Actions runner, like we cordon off portions of memory to act as disk so that any kind of integration tests that you're doing inside of CI that's doing a lot of operations to disk think like you're testing database migrations in CI. By using RAM disks instead inside of the runner, it's not going to a physical drive, it's going to memory.
And that's orders of magnitude faster. The other part of build performance is the stuff that's not the tech side of it, it's the observability side of it. is you can't actually make a build faster if you don't know where it should be faster.
Chapter 6: What innovative treatments has Sid explored during his cancer battle?
And we look for patterns and commonalities across customers, and that's what drives our product roadmap. This is the next thing we'll start optimizing for.
OK, so when you build with Depot, you're getting this. You're getting the essential goodness of relentless pursuit of very, very fast builds near zero speed builds. And that's cool.
Chapter 7: How does Sid view the future of software development?
Kyle and his team are relentless on this pursuit. You should use them. depot.dev. Free to start. Check it out.
Chapter 8: What advice does Sid have for aspiring developers in today's landscape?
One-liner change in your GitHub actions. depot.dev. Well, friends, we're back with a good friend of ours. It's been, Sid, way too long. Way too long, for sure. Way too long. The last time we talked to you, the last time I talked to you, at least, was when you were leading GitLab to IPO. This is pre-IPO. This is in 2022. It was speculative. That was obviously the North Star for you.
You've accomplished that mission. You've had a cancer journey. You've had a investor journey. You've had the American dream journey. And kind of back again in a way. So welcome back to the show. It's been way too long. Good to see you again. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to this.
When we look at your story from, you know, some would say, you know, the shadow of GitHub from way back in the day to now, how do you personally reflect that? on your journey, I would say in tech, but also as a CEO, as just a normal person, as an investor, how do you reflect on this long journey of yours?
Well, it's been amazing kind of living the American dream. 2015, I came to the US. We raised money for GitLab and we set our sights on growing the company, becoming a public company. And then six years later, we took it public, which was amazing. Amazing. And we're very fortunate to... Six years to public, huh? Yeah.
That's some speed.
That speed.
And you were very much a leader, too, with the way you opened the company, your open docs, a lot of the ways you hired, the ways that you showcased culture. A lot of that was even... Not so much not in public, but you were very much a star of that. And then you were also a company that IPO'd. That seems like maybe not the way it should be done, but it's obviously the way you did do it.
Yeah, we tried to lead the company with a ton of transparency. And we believe that helped us be an all remote company, but at the same time being super on the same page. And it's paid its dividends both in coordinating us, hiring great people, but also getting customers excited about the company itself and how we partner.
Are you still involved in any capacity with GitLab? Yeah, for sure.
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