GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

> difference between Ubuntu and Arch

The difference between Debian and Ubuntu is enough to be a nuisance.

The Dell XPS laptop my employer provided cannot boot Debian and I'm stuck with Ubuntu. Same packages, maybe a version or two are more recent right? Nope. Aside from the egregious transparent snap installs when using apt (which can't uninstall snaps, thanks Canonical), there's a lot of minute details that amount to quite a time loss (that and having a laptop with no USB/RJ45/HDMI ports). Simple scripts that work on one OS and not the other, font scaling and rendering making my standard 1080p screen unreadable, absurd default configuration that makes WiFi unusable, etc.

Glad I don't have to manage the same oddities for the actual work I do. Everything is simple once it's all Dockerized.

But that's not true either. I had a different problem setting up the repository with every developer and they were all using the same OS. No repo in sources.list (how?), no docker group created when re/installing the docker package (why?), all kind of weird stuff happening.

So you tell me there's a way to have all devs working and testing on the same environment? That's great! But it is _not_ worth handing over everything to Microsoft or any other third party.

I'll never trust GitHub, GitLab, or any other forge with business-critial stuff. Host your own code, commit your dependencies, have your build script work locally. I've deployed through Git{Hub,Lab} outages and the leftpad fiasco, and the cost was insignificant. Host a mirror there for cheap if you want, that's what I do for my public projects (but after the copilot debacle how can I trust GitHub with anything?).

And what if you're a remote team? You can't rely on the internet. My ISP was kind enough to remind me of this when I got my very first outage with them one hour before starting at my current company.

As valuable a product GitHub is and Coderspace may be, it is a step closer to the Minitel 2.0 where everything is centralized and controlled by a single entity. It's not the internet, it's MSN at best.

At patent office right now with this. My attorney said will go through the USPO like butter.

As much as I’d like to try this, the blog post reads as « our dev environment was so heavy, our git repository so old that we put everything in the cloud even your dev env ».

If you’re building a new startup, you don’t need this. Use docker-compose.

The current latest full stack project I built requires a single command: npm run dev. Launches docker-compose (PostgreSQL), Next.js and ngrok (expose/webhooks).

And it takes 10 minutes to setup.

Not everybody has the requirements of GitHub!

Still, I’m sure I’ll use this in a year :)

> How far we have come from the hand oiling of early motorcycles is indicated by the fact that some of the current Mercedes models do not even have a dipstick. This serves nicely as an index of the shift in our relationship to machines. If the oil level should get low, there is a very general exhortation that appears on a screen: “Service Required.” Lubrication has been recast, for the user, in the frictionless terms of the electronic device. In those terms, lubrication has no rationale, and ceases to be an object of active concern for anyone but the service technician. In a sense, this increases the freedom of the Mercedes user. He has gained a kind of independence by not having to futz around with dipsticks and dirty rags.

> But in another sense, it makes him more dependent. The burden of paying attention to his oil level he has outsourced to another, and the price he pays for this disburdenment is that he is entangled in a more minute, all-embracing, one might almost say maternal relationship with . . . what? Not with the service technician at the dealership, at least not directly, as there are layers of bureaucracy that intervene. Between driver and service tech lie corporate entities to which we attribute personhood only in the legal sense, as an abstraction: the dealership that employs the technician; Daimler AG, Stuttgart, Germany, who hold the service plan and warranty on their balance sheet; and finally Mercedes shareholders, unknown to one another, who collectively dissipate the financial risk of your engine running low on oil. There are now layers of collectivized, absentee interest in your motor’s oil level, and no single person is responsible for it. If we understand this under the rubric of “globalization,” we see that the tentacles of that wondrous animal reach down into things that were once unambiguously our own: the amount of oil in a man’s crankcase.

> It used to be that, in addition to a dipstick, you had also a very crude interface, simpler but no different conceptually from the sophisticated interface of the new Mercedes. It was called an “idiot light.” One can be sure that the current system is not referred to in the Mercedes owner’s manual as the “idiot system,” as the harsh “judgment carried by that term no longer makes any sense to us. By some inscrutable cultural logic, idiocy gets recast as something desirable.

> It is important to understand that there has been no “high-tech” development such that it is no longer important to stay on top of oil consumption and leakage. With enough miles, oil is still consumed and will still leak; running low on oil will still trash the motor. There is nothing magical about the Mercedes, though such a superstition is encouraged by the absence of a dipstick. The facts of physics have not changed; what has changed is the place of those facts in our consciousness, and therewith the basic character of material culture.

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford

That pricing is a ~70% markup over standard Azure rates.

Companies typically buy laptops with an assumed 3 year lifespan; so, let's assume a high-end $3000 laptop, that would be ~$83/month. Of course, you need a computer to access Github Codespaces, so this isn't saving all of that money. Maybe companies can cut some costs by buying cheaper laptops?

Or if you want a more apples-to-apples; a Lenovo ThinkStation P620 runs ~$2800 for 32 threads and 64gb memory. DIY would also land somewhere around that $3K mark; a Threadripper 2950x (32 thread) is $1100; 64gb of memory is around $250.

This, of course, is the most expensive option they have; the more standard option would be 4/8; for which you would pay ~$85/mo (all the time, normal work hours), for the privilege of a machine that's far less powerful than any laptop any of our developers have. For god's sake, my M1 MacBook Air is an 8/16, with four of those cores far more powerful than any three year old Xeon Azure has running. And it was like $1400.

I understand maintaining dev machines isn't the easiest thing in the world. I have never once worked anywhere where it was such a problem that the company would justify tens of thousands of dollars in spend. Because it kind of is one-or-the-other; time invested in making Github Codespaces work for your company is time not invested in maintaining local dev environments. And Github's ideal end-state is companies totally rely on Codespaces, so the local dev environments languish.

Its not worth it.