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First Impressions of GitHub Codespaces

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Re: First Impressions of GitHub Codespaces

#61

Post by _54qb »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #48
_54qb wrote: post #45

While impressive technology, I still get that eerie feeling of my computer's ownership being slowly taken away from me. The problem is not Github codespaces offering us an alternative to traditional dev environments, the problem may be 10 years from now, when someone says: "All the coding is done on the web nowadays, why should we allow users to install compilers and dev tools on their machine? They may use those for…

>They may hurt themselves in the process and sue us! has a hacker ever hurt themselves by hacking and sued the company whose computer they were using? Anyway I guess people can also buy their own computers if they want to play outside the sandbox.

Fair enough. But that was not my rationale, it was just a made-up corporate rationale that is not too far from what I can observe in reality. Take, for example, lobbyists in right-to-repair hearings. They use arguments like this: "If we let users repair their smartphones, they might hurt themselves, so it must not be allowed and instead always performed by a skilled technician". The implication always being, that if users hurt themselves, they will sue.

> Anyway I guess people can also buy their own computers if they want to play outside the sandbox.

My point was, precisely, that we might get to some point where this is no longer possible. Imagine they stopped selling what we today call "PC", and instead everything is closer to smartphones or tablets. There would be no way to setup a development environment on the machine. There's no sudo access, no compiler toolchain...

Re: First Impressions of GitHub Codespaces

#62

Post by vidarh »

andybak wrote: post #56
vidarh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The specific tools are not really the point. The same applies whichever tools you need - sooner or later you'll need to cleanly set up a new machine, at which point committing your configs pays for itself.

I can't think of anything that I need in a config that isn't a) a luxury or b) specific to my local machine. There's a few tweaks I miss when working in a remote shell but none are essential.

So you can think of things that'd be useful, you just see it as a luxury. But the point is it's not a luxury once you commit the configs and setup scripts and turn it into a single command to deploy anywhere you want it.

And what I found when I started doing that was that suddenly I was a lot less hesitant to let myself become dependent on time-saving tools because I knew they'd be available anywhere with ease.

I can't imagine suffering through a default shell environment or a default editor config any more.

But committing them is not just about remote machines, but about having a clean record of what is needed to set up any new machine I acquire as well.

Re: First Impressions of GitHub Codespaces

#63

Post by easton »

rplnt wrote: post #46
_54qb wrote: post #45

While impressive technology, I still get that eerie feeling of my computer's ownership being slowly taken away from me. The problem is not Github codespaces offering us an alternative to traditional dev environments, the problem may be 10 years from now, when someone says: "All the coding is done on the web nowadays, why should we allow users to install compilers and dev tools on their machine? They may use those for…

10? I'm fairly certain some companies were asking for these features precisely for this reason. To have better control.

It’s the same rationale as having Citrix for developers in big banks, so they don’t have anything on their local machine. And this way you don’t have to keep a big machine with a bunch of GPUs around.

Re: First Impressions of GitHub Codespaces

#64

Post by anaganisk »

soco wrote: post #60
AbuAssar wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gitpod is powered by eclipse theia

The GitPod own page says "Gitpod is an open-source Kubernetes application providing prebuilt, collaborative development environments in your browser - powered by VS Code." Might be they mean that Eclipse Theia can run VSCode extensions?

Eclipse thea is a wrapper On Vscode for users who want to build upon it.

Re: First Impressions of GitHub Codespaces

#65

Post by greggman3 »

sudhirj wrote: post #24

The big draw for me is working on the iPad. If you attach the keyboard it becomes a pretty awesome 'do anything' device, now that you can code on it as well. Can't build native apps yet, but seems like a future opportunity. Web apps / PWA development works great, I can just have the app running in a hovering window / on a quarter of the screen.

It's such a contrast to see this and the post by setzer22 right next to each other

Re: First Impressions of GitHub Codespaces

#66

Post by greggman3 »

wildpeaks wrote: post #57

One of the things I hope to use Codespace for is a CMS editor directly hooked into source control and its permissions (given static sites already get generated by the CI), instead of hosting some admin UI on a thirdparty server that needs to deal with all the authentication flows, without sacrificing ease of use for non-devs. If all goes well, it could even customize the Codespace with VSCode plugins to fit customer-…

My problem (so far) with github for CMS is no preview. Maybe preview could be added to Codespace as a VSC plugin. It needs to access all the media I'm adding as well. Hmmm, maybe I will look into this :)

Re: First Impressions of GitHub Codespaces

#68

Post by greggman3 »

greggman3 wrote: post #66
wildpeaks wrote: post #57

One of the things I hope to use Codespace for is a CMS editor directly hooked into source control and its permissions (given static sites already get generated by the CI), instead of hosting some admin UI on a thirdparty server that needs to deal with all the authentication flows, without sacrificing ease of use for non-devs. If all goes well, it could even customize the Codespace with VSCode plugins to fit customer-…

My problem (so far) with github for CMS is no preview. Maybe preview could be added to Codespace as a VSC plugin. It needs to access all the media I'm adding as well. Hmmm, maybe I will look into this :)

AFAIK VSC is explicitly not iOS/Android friendly. Maybe Codespaces will end up changing that but they make a point of Monaco (The editor portion of VSCode) not being designed for tablets/mobile

https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/

Re: First Impressions of GitHub Codespaces

#69

Post by swiley »

I’d bet this stuff is mostly popular because of really really broken platforms like iOS.

Also OT: Wow. That’s an entirely new level of broken web design. The links don’t even work! How can you mess up HTML this badly?

Re: First Impressions of GitHub Codespaces

#70

Post by koonsolo »

bregma wrote: post #67

The pendulum swings again. Remember mainframes? Remember PCs? Remember thin clients? Rememeber PCs again? Remember this i a couple of years as the pendulum starts to swing back.

I love it how the pendulum always goes way to far to one side, to end up with enough force to go overboard on the other side again.

I guess it's the most natural way to find balance.

Same story for testing. I think we are at the end of "move fast and break things".

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