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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

#111
post #8

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

Reminds me of a project many years ago where I was forced to use a companies crappy home-grown CMS that deployed all their microsites, they had a weird code editor that they expected you to develop in inside the CMS. I wrote a selenium script that would login and upload the contents of my local files into the editor.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#112

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 would be happy to let go of an employee who bank their employment on the preference of toolings.

> Toolings are, like the name suggests, a means to an end.

It goes both ways. Employees are paid to accomplish an end, and I understand employees who are happy to walk away from an employer that micromanages the means to that end down to preferences in tooling. The reason you quit isn't because you miss Emacs (even if you do), the reason you quit is because your boss doesn't even trust you to choose a text editor.

That said, if the thing is your own product, yeah I get it: dogfooding is important. That said, I know of teams at Microsoft who do their (OS-agnostic) work on macOS... at some point accomplishing the end is more important than dogfooding, and you just let the workers use the tools that they're comfortable with.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#113

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.

I also don't use VS Code usually. My personal preference is a JetBrains IDE, but my point is more engineers should be able to choose the environment they're most productive in.

How is the performance on jetbrain IDE. I love webstorm & intellij but they are Soo slow compared to vscode for me.

At first I liked them because they have lots of great functionalities out of the box, but vscode has caught up and just yesterday I switched back to vscode from jetbrains. For java spring and react

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#114

Ugh, now not only you don't own your code ( ahem copilot cough ) you also don't own the tools to develop code. The direction the web is taking is worrisome. The issue is not so much senior devs, but new devs. If they start off with things like that, there' so much magic under the hood, they won't understand how anything works. They don't understand they don't own shit until it's too late. I remember when I first saw…

ownership issues aside, the "magic" under the hood is not a problem assuming it actually works. Its when the magic breaks, or works in unexpected ways, then it becomes a problem. Magic is also progress, and progress is usually good.

I think you could look at it in terms of sustainability: "magic" progress has the potential of "magically" vanishing if it's inner workings are not sound, reliant on an unreliable other, etc.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#115

Ugh, now not only you don't own your code ( ahem copilot cough ) you also don't own the tools to develop code. The direction the web is taking is worrisome. The issue is not so much senior devs, but new devs. If they start off with things like that, there' so much magic under the hood, they won't understand how anything works. They don't understand they don't own shit until it's too late. I remember when I first saw…

The same thing was said about every programming abstraction to ever be introduced. How do we expect people to build memory-efficient applications when they become reliant on a garbage collector?

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also don't use VS Code usually. My personal preference is a JetBrains IDE, but my point is more engineers should be able to choose the environment they're most productive in.

How is the performance on jetbrain IDE. I love webstorm & intellij but they are Soo slow compared to vscode for me. At first I liked them because they have lots of great functionalities out of the box, but vscode has caught up and just yesterday I switched back to vscode from jetbrains. For java spring and react

> How is the performance on jetbrain IDE. I love webstorm & intellij but they are Soo slow compared to vscode for me.

It's pretty configurable. In my experience, it's pretty quick. It's not text editor or VS Code quick but the only thing that ever trips me up is the occasional re-indexing. Well worth it for how well it does everything else.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, whenever I hear this kind of rhetoric - if my company ever required it's time for a new job - I roll my eyes. Sure, keep pushing yourself out of more companies, there are a lot of good engineers* who will be absolutely as productive as you and who won't be a drain on everyone around them. *it's always engineers making these statements or I only know engineers

It works both ways. There are plenty of companies that will happily take productive engineers, without forcing them to use a slow, poor-quality IDE as their main tool, full-time. It's not a minor annoyance if it's the tool you use throughout the day, to do a job for which you are then evaluated.

"Tools are just means to an end" is just one of the many rhetorical devices that cushy managers use to eschew responsibility. Of course they're means to an end, but some means are better than others, and usually those with better means end up doing a better job.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#118

Ugh, now not only you don't own your code ( ahem copilot cough ) you also don't own the tools to develop code. The direction the web is taking is worrisome. The issue is not so much senior devs, but new devs. If they start off with things like that, there' so much magic under the hood, they won't understand how anything works. They don't understand they don't own shit until it's too late. I remember when I first saw…

> If they start off with things like that, there' so much magic under the hood, they won't understand how anything works. They don't understand they don't own shit until it's too late.

I'm sure this has been said dozens of times throughout the years as we've built more and more tools of abstraction. As software gets more complicated, it's OK if not everyone fully understands every part of the stack. People specialize, and then become experts at their small scope.

Or even if they're not experts at their slice, not every company needs a 10x code wizard who understand the system up and down. Some companies just need someone lightly technical to mess with website templates or write simple scripts and services.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#119
Now it will be pretty easy to bring back those pesky remote workers to the offices. They will just tweak some code on the backend and poof, the latency of your home connection skyrockets to the point of typing becoming impossible. Luckily there won’t be such an issue with the office internet! I guess we’ll have to come back to the office to keep being productive in this web-based IDE :^)

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#120

Ugh, now not only you don't own your code ( ahem copilot cough ) you also don't own the tools to develop code. The direction the web is taking is worrisome. The issue is not so much senior devs, but new devs. If they start off with things like that, there' so much magic under the hood, they won't understand how anything works. They don't understand they don't own shit until it's too late. I remember when I first saw…

jamstack is very fucked up to me, glad I'm not going crazy. you basically offload EVERYTHING to 3rd parties.

I initially learned about it because a junior dev asked for advice on one of his/her apps. It was a college app, simple, it just gathered info from students. But, they offloaded all data to a third-party database. So you are actually giving a company a lot of sensitive, personal information about a fucking college.

He/She was concerned (and with good reason) about the safety of data. Had to learn the bad way :(

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