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GitHub Codespaces

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Re: GitHub Codespaces

#371

Post by fierarul »

eloff wrote: post #153
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…

I pay for the full JetBrains subscription. While I still use vscode for typescript and rust, I use JetBrains for anything else. It's one of those no brainer purchases that pays for itself within a month. Programmers create enormous value. If you can get even small single digit percentage improvements by leveraging better tooling, it pays for itself almost right away. I estimate conservatively I produce $500,000 in va…

Many vendors do think like this when they start their offer with 'how much is your time worth'? Indeed, your tool might save me 1 hour but it's not necessarily worth the price.

On complex codebases though I mostly need the IDE just to navigate code. Anything released in the past decade knows how to index some classes, jump around and do 'find usage'.

I agree that tooling most definitely helps, starting with your office, your chair, your hardware and your software config. You could also get 1% out of sleeping more I think.

Re: GitHub Codespaces

#372

Post by knodi123 »

meysholdt wrote: post #141
sneak wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are perpetual reminders all around that Microsoft's only pretending to like f/oss because that's where the developer attention (and thus corporate money) is. There's spyware in all of their open source apps (TypeScript excluded, because they couldn't get away with it there) that you can of course patch out, but you can't get it removed from the project because, free software or not, Microsoft gets to decide wha…

The view of the Eclipse Foundation onto VS Code may be interesting here: https://blogs.eclipse.org/post/mike-milinkovich/theia-open-s...

whoa, slick.

Re: GitHub Codespaces

#373

Post by zerkten »

op03 wrote: post #315
dotancohen wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I suppose that you would like a faster horse?

When someone builds something and doesn't actually mention why, its not unreasonable to ask what the motivation was...

Have you asked them? You can hit up pretty much anyone these days on Twitter and they'll respond, if the question is reasonable. You make it sound like someone owes you a response.

If this is about GitHub Actions specifically there is quite a bit of info at https://github.blog/2019-08-08-github-actions-now-supports-c.... My takeaway is that it's about packaging up Azure Pipelines in a way that GitHub users understand and complements other features. There are more jarring ways to integrate the products.

Re: GitHub Codespaces

#374

Post by clktmr »

I can see why this is interesting from a project manager's perspective. But why would I as a developer want this, let alone pay for it? Isn't this the "developing in a browser" nightmare everybody was joking about a few years ago?

Maybe this will work for developing web applications which are executed on a remote machine by design, but everything else?

Re: GitHub Codespaces

#375

Post by mcintyre1994 »

threeseed wrote: post #356
sparky_ wrote: post #284

Must be fun for @sytse to watch these GitHub announcements every year, where they consistently release the same thing GitLab rolled out two years prior. Codespaces -> https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/web_ide/ Insights -> https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/insights/ GH Actions -> https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ etc

Gitlab is a bit of a mess though: a) Gitlab.com is ridiculously slow. Even the CEO admits they failed to invest in it. b) You can't disable features you don't need so you end up with a sidebar full of Kubernetes and Security features for a Git project dedicated to documentation. c) Staggering amount of open issues and merge requests so you feel discouraged from even raising anything since it just gets lost in the wee…

I agree that there are loads of open Gitlab issues, but I’ve found that their team are really easy to communicate with, really open to feedback and somehow also respond really quickly on issues. I like that they use Gitlab for so much and that they’re still really open to hearing about a workflow that’s different to theirs and keen to help with that.

As a user I really like that they have their tickets open like that. I’d never contact Github and tell them about some minor feature that would be helpful or give them feedback on a new feature they’ve released because how would you even do that in a way that’s not annoying? And with Gitlab you often get to feed in at the design stage which you’re completely shut out from anywhere else.

I’m not sure if you’ve actually had issues go missing - I know they have loads of repos and I’ve only engaged with a few - but my experience definitely hasn’t been that things get lost in the weeds.

For what it’s worth I agree with all the extra features being too visible. I kinda get it - one day I’ll get round to learning Kubernetes and I’ll probably do something with Gitlab’s integration when I do - but while I don’t use them those features are definitely too visible and add too much clutter.

Re: GitHub Codespaces

#376

Post by novok »

WesleyJohnson wrote: post #325
bengalister wrote: post #286

I understand that many companies will be seduced by the offering and what could come next: * No more source code on developers machine so better for security. * No more development environment to setup and all the devs sharing the exact same settings: simplified onboarding of devs. * No need for costly developers machines. * No more infra to setup to host the source code repository, the CI/CD workflows (even if many…

How does something like this work when you have configurations not in source control? Access keys, passwords, IPs for database connectivity.

It would live in your own personal instance, just like how a lot of company confidential data lives in google docs and gmail today.

Re: GitHub Codespaces

#377

Post by swagonomixxx »

wpietri wrote: post #226
swagonomixxx wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Sure. The foundation of commerce is sustained relationships where value is mutually exchanged. I give you a few bucks, you give me a cheeseburger. If fix somebody's problem with a computer, they give me cash. Product for payment; value for value. When some commercial effort departs from that, it's good to be suspicious. The bills are getting paid somehow. E.g., look at network television from 1960-2000 or so. The vie…

Thanks for the detailed response.

I can definitely see where you're coming from. In fact, for VS Code, I believe they collect quite a bit of metrics on your usage of the product through telemetry, so it's definitely not "free" in the sense of "nothing given" - essentially, your programming and usage habits of the program are being sent to MS every second.

Re: the case of VS Code eliminating competition and MS losing the inventive to build good stuff, I think the core editor engine being open source gives me hope that this won't happen like in the olden days of MS. But of course, still a risk.

Re: GitHub Codespaces

#378

Post by crdrost »

vlunkr wrote: post #89
swagonomixxx wrote: post #60

This is pretty epic. VS Code has proven itself to be one of the best (if not the best) and feature-complete editor out there. It's basically an IDE of a ton of languages at this point, and it's completely free. Integrating it with GH is a no-brainer move from Microsoft's standpoint, to increase market share even further with more seamless integration. If they're able to do setup for Python, Go, Ruby, and JavaScript p…

> if not the best Them's fightin' words. But on a more serious note, I think 50% is a massive overestimation. We haven't seen pricing. Unless MS is willing to take a huge loss on this there's no way it will be free. We all know the resources required to run a modern web app in development mode. I can certainly see this being useful if you happen to be away from your dev machine, or if you just want to contribute to s…

MS may indeed be willing to take a "huge loss" on this. It may dwarf the added revenue from other sources.

So like I don't know your particular context but I imagine MS's moves would seem surprising for developers, say, at startups. Whereas if you work at an IT adjoint to a mechanical contractor it might make more sense. What's at stake is that MS might be ramping up to some bigger announcement, "GitHub Cloud" or so, where you pay some fee for the cloud hosting and the sales pitch is, "imagine that you can fix a bug from a bug report in a non-crappy editor like VS Code, do a quick code review and push a button which will run your tests, canary deploy, then version it and push it live -- we take care of all that infra, you just pay for the Azure hosting." If you give half of that for free to everybody, you nominally "lose" but you increase the adoption rate of a separate revenue machine, which makes up for it.

A similar strategy was used by Microsoft to make their initial profits with Windows. There it was "you don't have to worry about the hardware specs -- we have already worked all of those out and all of them work with Windows." The key point in both is to say, "what are people seeking out, at the same time as they are seeking out my product?" and then to either give people a lot of freedom or a really easy option. You would rather take one pill that is carefully engineered to have the right omega-3 balance to stave off depression AND is a good probiotic AND has all of your daily vitamins, than to have to bother with a separate fish oil pill and probiotic and multivitamin. Focusing on product "complements" is often a really good strategy.

Re: GitHub Codespaces

#379

Post by swagonomixxx »

vlunkr wrote: post #221
swagonomixxx wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

No the JetBrains IDE is the product. This phrase generally refers to things like Facebook or Google. They offer tons of free services in order to gather data about you and sell it to advertisers.

Thanks. VS Code is actually no saint in this regard. MS collects metrics through VS Code's "telemetry" option (I think toggle-able to off, not sure) and this data has no doubt been used to improve VS Code and help MS build better product offerings and hence more rake in more revenue.

Re: GitHub Codespaces

#380

Post by sq_ »

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…

> replacing Sublime, Atom and the rest

Regarding Atom, I've heard some whispers around the internet that they may slowly wind it down in favor of VSCode so that Microsoft doesn't have two competing text editors. Anyone know how true that might be?

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