Valery Sizov

Valery Sizov co-created GitLab in 2011 with Dmitriy Zaporozhets, contributing critical early engineering work to the Ruby on Rails codebase and helping to establish the project's initial momentum within the open-source community.

Valery Sizov is a software engineer and the co-creator of GitLab, who partnered with Dmitriy Zaporozhets in 2011 to build a better, web-based interface for Git. Sizov's technical contributions during the formative months of the project were instrumental in transforming the initial concept into a functional, usable application that could handle the basic needs of version control and code collaboration. His collaborative work with Zaporozhets established the foundational architecture and user experience principles that would attract the first wave of open-source contributors. Sizov's commitment to the open-source ethos and his dedication to building a tool that prioritized developer experience over complex, enterprise-centric features helped GitLab gain early traction and credibility within the global developer community. As the project grew and attracted commercial interest, Sizov's early engineering work provided the stable, scalable foundation upon which the company's future, more advanced features like CI/CD and security scanning would be built.