I've used Replit for love coding interviews when we are talking with candidates. From what I have seen I don't think I would choose to switch to it for a large project. However, it is nice for quick examples of a way for someone to write small chunks of code with no setup.
Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
111–120 of 246 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#112We are an agency where you might flip between working on several completely different projects in a week, and for us it's extremely useful. We'd had all our sites set up to run fairly easily via docker compose prior, but I'd still find myself debugging people's setups fairly frequently. And giving developers data and secrets was often either insecure or complicated, depending on the codebase. With codespaces, people…
Since devcontainer.json works fine on docker desktop, I usually use that, but I do use codespaces frequently for review and small patches, as well as exploring new libraries. I'm slowly adding devcontainers to the open source projects I work on. It's much nicer to have a docker compose file and several docker files in this setup than maintaining instructions on setting up test environments.
I've run k8s/k3s with docker-in-docker this way too. Really easy once you get it setup, and great for playing with architecture ideas.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#113I only lightly use the cloud hosted environments but regularly use dev containers now to ensure that complex development environment are only configured once and shared amongst a team. It ensures no more ' works on my machine issues ' plus means both development and production are extremely stable
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious what you do for the people on less-than-good internet connections? Or is everybody just onsite with a business-class SLA?
SSH used to work perfectly fine over 28.8 kbps modems. You don't really need a stellar connection for remote coding. If your internet is capable enough for a video call it can run a hundred remote IDEs side by side.
>SSH used to work perfectly fine over 28.8 kbps modems.
I can't agree with "perfectly fine" here. Not unless you enabled local echo in your terminal emulator. The keyboard latency, especially for typo correction, was maddening. I still remember what a staggering QoL improvement it was the first time I used a low-latency connection to a server.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
$60/yr vs thousands of $ upfront for a comparable desktop or notebook machine. Not to mention the superior network connectivity (10 gigabit/s). In fact, there are no 10gbps options from the common last mile carriers available at any price (AT&T, Crapcast). And if they did offer it, it'd probably be $500USD/mo+ just for Internet. AT&T has a 5gbps fiber plan available for $250USD+/mo, but there are very few (>10 fracti…
> The workstation has fast 2TB NVMe and 64gb of ram, 16 cores and a RTX GPU. > $60/yr vs thousands of $ upfront for a comparable desktop or notebook machine. I don't think we're talking about the same things here.
I paid $5000 for the workstation (2019) and upgraded to NVMe later, and I pay $0 for the datacenter because I have referred clients to their business and established a relationship over the years. Because when people find out how much cheaper it is to skip the cloud, they switch but don't know where to go.
I could upgrade to dual 2.5 GigE but I have nothing that needs that much bandwidth. I can download 30gb from hugging face in a few minutes which doesn't bother me.
The DC is about to onboard another client of mine, a startup that ran on AWS credits for 9 months. They are upgrading to a 64 core 2TB ram box that was an extra the DC had, for $3500, which will probably go into the rack next to mine.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#116bit biased, but we use coder (I work at coder)
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#117We do a mix:
* quick PR tweaks on someone else's branch => github code editor
* data science & customer success work: jupyter notebooks (GPU) & google colab (CPU)
Based on those experiences, and local dev experiences, we invest in a mix of native + containerized + ci/cd staging server dev experience... and not experimenting with cloud IDEs.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#118I got a cheap Hetzner Auction server for all the work needs https://www.hetzner.com/sb . I use VS Code remote to work there. It's easier and more convenient than Codespaces (and I think cheaper). Has a lot of benefits like instantly sharing a web server with the outside world, ability to run my servers and bots continuously, ability to work from different computers seamlessly. It also functions in many random ways (e…
[dead]
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could still totally lock it down and deny WAN access but holepunch just for your vpn of choice.
Doesn’t help when you truly don’t have WAN connectivity. Imagine working on an airplane where the wifi is unusable or unavailable, or working during a long NYC subway ride (where even mobile data connectivity between stations is only occasionally and transiently available in the underground segments of the system).
why would you be working while sitting on some type of conveyance?
doing things like that will not get you any rewards which compare to the effort you've spent. look out a window, I say.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Too bad Intellij requires the Ultimate version of their software to use their equivalent of the VScode server/client feature.
Don’t worry about the price. It’s absolute crap. [At least PyCharm remote is and I believe it has the same underlying Jetbrains architecture] Windows randomly quit, take forever to open, there are always indexing issues, etc. Locally everything is great, but remote is completely unstable.
I think it has you install something on the server if you want to, and it's more reliable. But yeah, completely in different league from vscode.