You're telling me there are cases where a company has so many projects in it's gitlab instance that employees routinely have to search for things? That seems odd to me. I'd expect there to be a naming scheme for most things, and even if there's some oddball project, I'd think somebody else you work with knows about it and where it is. My company has maybe 20-30 projects, and I can find any of them easily if I know the client's name.
Ever worked in a company with micro services or a company that has a bunch of employees? You'll have hundreds of projects easily if it's a bunch of teams. If someone tells me "it's in our SRE libs package" I'll go ahead and search that. (Usually I can't find it because it's in a separate namespace on our Gitlab instance. Doing that is an Enterprise only feature on Gitlab right now: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/search/advanced_global_searc...)
The point is that search is important and not a social network gimmick.
Yep, same here. We architected our services so that a common layer could be used which reduces service duplication but still we have over 700 projects for just one company doing end-to-end ecommerce and fulfillment. At some point you even start running out of names so you end up with people using acronyms from their specific fields which quickly ends up being unfindable. Not because of search but because you no longer know what to search for.
Actually, it doesn't even have to be microservices. At my current workplace we have over 1000 projects in our Gitlab. And many of those projects are a collection of up to 20 libraries.
I work for a university that has a centralized IT, but each of the schools may also have an IT group. When they setup a local Gitlab instance I moved our team's (web development) projects over.
We have over 60 projects alone within our group (our own school was decentralized, and only in the last 5 or so years have I been able to get things centralized within our team), and there's a ton that the centralized IT group has on the instance, plus all of those that other schools share. We currently have three people in our team (two designers/front-end, one full stack), but at one point were at six plus a consultant.
I've got a good idea of what most of the 60+ repos contain, and where things are, but a good search for the various open repos, and those that I'm semi-associated with, would be fantastic.