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GitHub Codespaces

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Re: GitHub Codespaces

#271

Post by wpietri »

meheleventyone wrote: post #253
wpietri wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it's a generalization, not an absolute. But for me there's not a big difference between "I'm the end product" and "I'm an intermediate product used to increase sales of the end product". Microsoft isn't a charity; they're an oligopoly pushing hard to keep their stock price up.

I think your characterization of being an "intermediate product" is also dubious since you aren't being sold in any reasonable sense ala the way you are with ad tech. And whilst MS are obviously in the business of making money that doesn't mean it's the only thing they'll do.

If you'd like to argue that MS is giving this away just to be nice, instead of as a calculated move toward sustaining or increasing revenue, I'd be interested to see that. But for now let's assume they're doing what their shareholders expect: making money.

We can't know whether I'm an intermediate product without knowing their goals, which they're unlikely to be transparent about. But lets suppose one of their goals is usage and market share statistics that they use as proof to convince paying customers. In that case, my usage is very much an intermediate product.

Or let's imagine that one of their goals is restored market dominance in developer tools. To that end, they would like their competitors to receive less money, leading to their collapse. If they paid somebody else to give away developer tools for that purpose, I'd obviously be the product. That they're paying for that internally obscures it, but fundamentally doesn't change the exploitative nature of the relationship.

Re: GitHub Codespaces

#272

Post by op03 »

twunde wrote: post #164
mcolyer wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Codespaces uses the same underlying technology as Visual Studio Codespaces to bring a fully GitHub-native experience to our GitHub users. We've been working with multiple teams on the Visual Studio side to make this happen (I work as the product lead on Codespaces)

Similarly Github Actions is reusing a lot of Azure Pipelines under the hood. One of the most impressive parts about Microsoft's recent acquisitions is how quickly essentially two separate companies are now sharing code. It's hard enough to get different teams/products in the same company to use shared code in a meaningful way, and Microsoft has accomplished it with a new company.

All that is nice. But who are they building this for? Who is asking for this stuff?

Re: GitHub Codespaces

#273

Post by ehsankia »

xendipity wrote: post #2

Ah, this really makes sense with all of the recent work they've done on VSCode's remote development capabilities. - An early announcement on their focus: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2019/05/02/remote-develo... - Most (all?) of their recent VSCode updates include improvements to remote development. i.e.: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_44#_remote-developm... - Facebook partnering and becoming an early…

Is there a way yet for me to run a server on Windows, and be able to code anywhere from my web browser? I basically want code-server that works on Windows.

https://github.com/cdr/code-server

Re: GitHub Codespaces

#274

Post by Guillaume86 »

arodyginc wrote: post #104
skrtskrt wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While VS Code is definitely good in general, and first choice for languages like JavaScript, I find it really hard to compare it to JetBrains PyCharm and GoLand (understanding GoLand has no free version). The debugging and refactoring experiences for Go and Python in VSCode feel slow, awkward to set up and configure and just generally tacked-on. I have gotten the PyCharm professional and GoLand licensed through my em…

Even for C# VSCode is way less useful than VisualStudio, which also has a free version (though doesn't run on Linux)

> Even for C#

Weird way to put it, C# is expected to work better in VisualStudio, it's the standard/officially supported .NET IDE. For everything else I prefer VS Code personally.

Re: GitHub Codespaces

#275

Post by aprdm »

suyash wrote: post #155
reggieband wrote: post #150

Microsoft is really the best at the slow strategic burn. * You host your project in github * You fund your project using github sponsors * You develop your project using github codespaces * You compile, test and deploy using github actions * You cloud host on azure Each individual feature is definitely great. I'm not trying to be critical of Microsoft trying to turn their investment in github into a profitable busine…

Yup all the free stuff is ultimately to lead us into using and paying for Azure. Need an open source alternative to GitHub.

Doesn't gitlab fit the bill here?

Re: GitHub Codespaces

#276

Post by wpietri »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #232
wpietri wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in the sense which that is meant. The foundation of commerce is long-term, positive-sum relationships between people. The people at my corner grocery are looking out for the needs of me and my neighbors; we look out for them in return. That relationship is fundamentally different than the one between cow and meatpacker.

Yes, you are the product in the sense that this is meant. The people at my grocery store track my purchases using my loyalty card, use that data to influence their ads, and sell that data to others. Jetbrains might not do this, but if they can make money from this, they would be just as incentivized to do this as GitHub.

Good thing my grocery store doesn't have a loyalty program or track purchases then. Maybe you should use a different one?

I agree the lets-exploit-the-customers behavior you're talking about is currently common, but it's far from universal. And regardless, in a value-for-money relationship one has power that just isn't there when one is purely being sold.

Re: GitHub Codespaces

#277

Post by apozem »

ehsankia wrote: post #265
reggieband wrote: post #150

Microsoft is really the best at the slow strategic burn. * You host your project in github * You fund your project using github sponsors * You develop your project using github codespaces * You compile, test and deploy using github actions * You cloud host on azure Each individual feature is definitely great. I'm not trying to be critical of Microsoft trying to turn their investment in github into a profitable busine…

Don't forget about VSCode! It's very quickly becoming one of the best free editors out there, replacing Sublime, Atom and the rest. I'm actually curious, will this be using Atom, it's own thing, or VS Code as the editor backend? I have actually been running code-server [0] which finally allows me to have my powerful editor with all my settings and extensions and working with my own files on any device. [0] https://gi…

> Don't forget about VSCode! It's very quickly becoming one of the best free editors out there

I don't know if people realize just how much market share VS Code has grabbed. It went from 7% to 50% in five years, according some some surveys [1]. Microsoft is quietly dominating this part of the stack. [2]

[1]: https://www.welcometothejungle.com/en/articles/vs-code-javas...

[2]: This is not an invitation to debate the merits of VS Code or tell me which editor you use, just an observation of growth

Re: GitHub Codespaces

#278

Post by [deleted] »

swagonomixxx wrote: post #206
wpietri wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free is a huge minus in my book. If I'm not the customer, then I'm the product. I'll happily keep paying for my JetBrains all-product license: https://www.jetbrains.com/all/

> If I'm not the customer, then I'm the product. I'm not sure what you mean by this, care to expand? Aren't you also the product for JetBrains, since you're one of the customers that's keeping them afloat?

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Codespaces

#279

Post by pkaye »

airstrike wrote: post #144
minimaxir wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's plausible, given that VS Code is effectively a web app. (the exception in features could be Extensions) Not the first IDE to have full-feature parity on desktop and web.

Not having extensions alone already means it's not the full experience. How many people run vanilla VS Code? Can I run unit tests? Debug?

Are extensions not allowed?

Re: GitHub Codespaces

#280

Post by ehsankia »

aerovistae wrote: post #148
marceloabsousa wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if this is really true. Why would you want to become a contributor to an OSS project if you can't bother to get it working on your machine? You actually learn quite a bit about the project by going through its dependency hell.

Idk, I feel like we've been trained to believe this is necessary. Why you should need to know more about a dependency than its documented API? This sort of reminds me of Americans believing their current healthcare situation is the only way to do it even though it's awful.

Sometimes setup on different platforms is different in very subtle and hard to debug ways, and for smaller OSS projects that haven't yet been tested on different platforms, it may be very hard to figure that out. Now you can develop even on a chromebook (without the terminal access) without having to deal with any of that.
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