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GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

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Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#41
post #2

Unpopular opinion with a lot of my peers, but "fragile local dev environment" is usually a sign of an unwieldy, tightly coupled codebase with a lot of parts, scripts, etc. Trying to hide that complexity with docker or codespaces, etc is just a bandaid in many cases vs dealing with the root issues.

In my experience, even with simple flask projects, I've found just the difference between Ubuntu and Arch to be irritating:

1. Ubuntu seems to have trouble with psycopg2 while Arch does not, so I often use psycopg2-bin just so Ubuntu developers can easily install the requirements (learned the hard way). 2. Some older (supported) editions of Ubuntu create extra lines in `pip freeze`, including `pkg-resource=0.0.0` which throws an error when installing on nearly any machine (including cloud versions of Ubuntu in Github Actions.

I have an application that uses docker-compose and has Elasticsearch as an image. In order to run it, I have to expand the vm_max_map (or something, I forget). But there are different ways of doing this in Windows vs Linux.

Differences between environments are legion. Unless a company wants to just send standardized laptops to every developer, it seems way better to just spin up a cloud vm that is already set. Plus, there's easier reproducibility in a cloud vm vs a physical machine (unless you want to reach for something like nixos, but hell, what company is equipped for that yet?

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#42
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the GitHub Codespaces personal beta: counterintuitively, the UI/UX of Codespaces is as performant as VS Code on the desktop.

Doesn't VS Code essentially run in a browser anyway?

Yes, with special Electron shenanigans that still work in a normal browser well I suppose. The web UI has a few features that make it more device agnostic too (e.g. a hamburger menu to replace the File menu. Yes, you can run Codespaces on an iPad.)

Code server (https://github.com/cdr/code-server) works in a similar way using your own PC as a host, but for whatever reason Codespaces is more performant.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#43

I would quit so fast if my company forced me to use a web IDE.

I'm in the GitHub Codespaces personal beta: counterintuitively, the UI/UX of Codespaces is as performant as VS Code on the desktop.

Isn’t VS Code Electron based? Same diff at that point

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#44
post #9
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article mentions supporting vim and emac, which probably means any editor can be supported. Visual Studio Code is great. It’s the primary tool GitHub.com engineers use to interface with codespaces. But asking our Vim and Emacs users to commit to a graphical editor is less great. If Codespaces was our future, we had to bring everyone along. Happily, we could support our shell-based colleagues through a simple upda…

Sounds like terminal editors can be supported but not alternative graphical editors like Sublime or IntelliJ.

I think terminal editors are supported by allowing an SSH tunnel, and both Sublime and the IntelliJ suite have plugins to allow you to use them against remote systems over ssh

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#45

I'm currently working on a huge codebase that takes forever to compile. I'd love to use Codespaces or a self hosted alternative so that I don't need to carry around a heavy i7 laptop. Being able to develop in the cloud from a browser opens up the possibility to develop from a thin Chromebook.

You can do this right now with the Remote SSH extension for VS Code:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod...

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#47

I would quit so fast if my company forced me to use a web IDE.

GitHub isn't forcing anybody to use a web IDE. The most broadly used access interface is VSCode. Then there are heretics like me who choose to ssh in so we can use Vim. This is described in the article.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#49

I would quit so fast if my company forced me to use a web IDE.

The article specifically says that they support their vim and emacs users by allowing them to SSH in edit code.

The article says they support web based development, or ssh'ing into the codespaces machine.

There are other IDEs besides VS Code and shell based ones.

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