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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

#141
post #38

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

(googler, opinions are my own). Google allows for normal desktop IDEs, plus having a web based one. The funny thing is, many people move to the web based one because it is so good. But Google is also unique in how piper/citc[0] (our source control) works. It's effectively designed for web/cloud based style development, so the workflow for web based dev and desktop dev are effectively the same. So web dev can work, bu…

We also "allow" both but the size of the repo and build process are quickly getting out of hand for something to run on a laptop. In the past we had tools to manage the size of what an IDE had to index, etc. but these were abandoned in favor of the cloud effort, so to develop locally with any sanity you have to use years-old IDE versions and pretty much debug it yourself.

The cloud environment builds and runs faster but the autocomplete, go-to-definition, etc. are pathetic.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The difference is that you don't pay a monthly subscription to use a garbage collector.

Garbage-collection-as-a-service would get a ton of venture capital though.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#143

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.

There's nothing about jamstack that requires you to use third-parties (except the CDN part, I guess, but that's just a mirror). You could just as easily host your own CMS and database and call out to it the same way.

It's just that like auth, logging, etc, CDNs have been neatly abstracted out and service-ified in such a way that it's often more economical to go third-party. But that choice is orthogonal to jamstack.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The difference is that you don't pay a monthly subscription to use a garbage collector.

There's two things happening in this post:

1. Development environments are running on Kubernetes, and VS Code is remoting into them. You don't have to pay a monthly subscription for that. VS Code remoting is free-as-in-beer and Kubernetes is free-as-in-speech.

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/azure/kubernetes

2. The actual Kubernetes hosting is the product "GitHub Codespaces" running on Azure. GitHub certainly isn't paying a monthly fee to themselves for this; they are, technically, self-hosting it. I agree that you probably do want to have the option to run it yourself, but I think you do, given 1.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#145
post #38

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

(googler, opinions are my own). Google allows for normal desktop IDEs, plus having a web based one. The funny thing is, many people move to the web based one because it is so good. But Google is also unique in how piper/citc[0] (our source control) works. It's effectively designed for web/cloud based style development, so the workflow for web based dev and desktop dev are effectively the same. So web dev can work, bu…

Is the IDE based on Eclipse/IntelliJ/something else?

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#147

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…

Such a stale take. Can I assume you are pretty much against the cloud in general?

I'm not against the cloud, I use it in a daily basis. I don't mean you have to phisically own your servers. But it's not the same, to me, having your MySQL or Posgres DB up in the cloud, than using things like Firebase.

I just don't like the direction of moving the development environment to the cloud. It makes it easier to just consume third-party services and a) Don't understand how anything works, and b) Don't own anything.

If you know, fully aware, what the cloud implies, then sure, use it, but it's dangerous when the decision comes out of ignorance.

I guess there's not really much you can do about it though. People will do whatever is easier, and not everyone wants to know how things actually work.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#148

Is it just me or VSCode is dauntingly complex? There are so many configuration options and I often get lost in it. I've been using Sublime Text for a decade and it has kept the scope creep to a minimum. I've also used JetBrains IDEs and while there is a massive amount of complexity, it is well organized I think. I just get anxiety from launching VSCode, may be it is because of not being familiar with it, I don't know…

In Sublime Text I needed to config things very often.

In VSCode (VSCodium to be more specific) I very rarely need to configure things.

From my doffiles git log - two config changes this year so far.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#149
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the whole outrage over Apple taking advantage of customers' willingness to hand over control of their phones to them, I hope folks can see the parallels here and reject this. At this point Microsoft's strategy around GitHub, VS Code, Copilot, etc. should be pretty obvious, and we should all be running for the hills.

> At this point Microsoft's strategy around GitHub, VS Code, etc. should be pretty obvious As someone not following this closely, what would that strategy be?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#150
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't most IDE's have the ability to edit remote files over SSH? I know VSCode can, and I remember reading a comment from an emacs user doing that. It looks like IntelliJ can do that too, though it seems to edit local copies of files and sync over SSH. There's also SSHFS, though I don't know how good of an experience that is. It can be a pain to set up, but is it more of a pain than setting up a dev environment the o…

Good point! I suspect the issue will be running tests. From what I gather they did all this to save developers the pain of compiling ruby gems + specific stuff on your environment (which can be a huge pain...) If you edit a file using some sync over ssh option, and want to run a test - how do you proceed? And how is this not the same thing as just checking out the git repo locally in the first place?

> If you edit a file using some sync over ssh option, and want to run a test - how do you proceed?

Well you have your files synced over ssh and also have a terminal over ssh which you use to run your tests. Am I missing something?

> And how is this not the same thing as just checking out the git repo locally in the first place?

It's not just avoiding cloning the git repo. It's avoiding building all the dependencies and getting them configured and running. For most of my projects that's not a big deal but I expect GitHub has several databases with specific configuration, memcached or redis, maybe custom patched builds, etc.

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