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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

#71

Post by georgeecollins »

pegler wrote: post #19
blueplanet200 wrote: post #3

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

I am wary of requiring an internet connection in order to develop, but there seem to be more and more advantages to using something like Codespaces. The article describes using pretty much any IDE, so they are just offloading the setup and running of the development environment to the cloud while letting you run your preferred IDE locally.

I can see how a web based IDE speeds up on boarding and reduces the friction in support and collaboration. But I wonder if it reduces the skills engineers develop over time?

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#72

Post by michaelpb »

gedy wrote: 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.

I'm totally with you here. Like, ideally you should be able to clone, install packages, and then do ``npm run start'' or ``python manage.py runserver'' or whatever, and the result should be a mostly functioning web app running locally. If it needs certain attached services, they should be 1) as standard/boring as possible (eg SQL, so you can have mocked versions of them for tests), 2) and added sparingly in only well-motivated situations (eg do you really need to have that caching DB, before you even have profiled real traffic?)

IMO investing time to keep applications "normal" like this pays off in the long run. It keeps development closer to "greenfield", which causes a general multiplying effect. Tutorials are slightly more likely to work, 3rd party packages will be quicker to integrate, etc etc.

(Note that this is separate from dev/prod parity, which is also good.)

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#73

Post by fridif »

reidjs wrote: post #60
stuff4ben wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems unnecessarily complex and time-consuming. Unless your company's work machine is locked down and you can't be productive on it...

If the company IDE is annoying to use, then rewriting it is probably a net time saver. The time consuming part of coding is rarely typing the code, afterall.

Exactly. I need Intellij to be productive in such a horrifically spaghetti code base

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#74

Post by dangfang »

justicezyx wrote: post #53
blueplanet200 wrote: post #3

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

I would be happy to let go of an employee who bank their employment on the preference of toolings. Hear me out: Toolings are, like the name suggests, a means to an end. If a web IDE is fast, works reasonably, and can continue improve itself. And the learning curve is friendly to engineers with different background and experience. Everyone should be comfortable to be nudged to use it. And if the tool additionally is a…

I'd absolutely never work with someone so arrogant (and, for lack of a more polite word, dumb, as you).

When I work for someone, I do the work they ask me and in return they pay me AND I get to learn something. For my learning process, I need the work part to be over fast. And that means I need to use stuff that I works best for me. I also need to be able to be able to fulfill my potential and spend time doing actual work (again, using tools that work for me). I don't want to spend a day setting up vscode and then realizing I can never edit as fast on it as vim what with the 300ms latency it adds to every keystroke

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#75

Post by nomel »

msbarnett wrote: post #20
pegler wrote: 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…

> The article mentions supporting vim and emac, which probably means any editor can be supported. I read that as you can ssh in and run a terminal-based editor, but that doesn't seem to offer much support for people looking to edit in NEdit or Intellij or Atom or Sublime or whatever else. Maybe some of those could be supported by forwarding an XSession out of the image, but that's going to suck hard for people on mac…

I would claim that if you can SSH in, you can do anything, including exposing a network share over ssh.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#77

Post by fridif »

eru wrote: post #32
fridif wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I write all my code on my personal laptop and then retype it into my company's IDE

I wonder if that's against your employment contract.

Probably, but I am more likely to be fired for not doing work

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#78

Post by tempfs »

ionwake wrote: post #40

Just a couple of years ago some kid gained access to every repo on github. Now githubs code is going to be developed on an online platform, which works by sharing code others have uploaded. I have a feeling that this is not a good recipe.

Microsoft owns Github now. There is only really one way things will go from that point.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#79

Post by EduardoBautista »

fourseventy wrote: post #70
wincent wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have to drag your .vimrc and plugins along every time you set up a new code space? My vim setup is pretty bespoke, it would be annoying to have to set that up every time.

I once had a setup where I could just clone a repository and run a script to get my dotfiles set up. For Vim, I would just need to then run the command to install the plugins and that was that.

Edit: Here is the CLI program that helped me set this up:

https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#80

Post by mattnewton »

fridif wrote: post #8
blueplanet200 wrote: post #3

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

I write all my code on my personal laptop and then retype it into my company's IDE

Don't you then have to maintain a copy of all the dependencies and input data on your personal laptop? I can't imagine myself being productive this way, even for small standalone projects where cloning everything to the personal laptop is feasible. This sounds awful and the company IDE must be even worse somehow.
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