Simon Willison’s Weblog

GitLab Culture: The phases of remote adaptation. GitLab claim to be “the world’s largest all-remote company”—1300 employees across 65 countries, with not a single physical office. Lots of interesting thinking in this article about different phases a company can go through to become truly remote-first. “Maximally efficient remote environments will do as little work as possible synchronously, instead focusing the valuable moments where two or more people are online at the same time on informal communication and bonding.” They also expire their Slack messages after 90 days to force critical project information into documents and issue threads. # 22nd June 2021, 12:37 am

Scaling the GitLab database. Lots of interesting details on how GitLab have worked to scale their PostgreSQL setup. They’ve avoided sharding so far, instead opting for database pooling with pgbouncer and read-only replicas using hot standbys. I like the way they deal with replica lag—they store the current WAL position in a redis key for the user every time there’s a write, then use pg_last_xlog_replay_location() on the various replicas to check and see if they have caught up next time the user makes a request that needs to read some data. # 30th October 2017, 8:53 pm