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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

#211

Post by pxc »

thibran wrote: post #14

Maybe they should have used Nix to get a dev environment that is identical for everyone... but that would be too easy. The future is long term probably in the web, I'm just not sure we are there yet.

Apparently you can set up Codespaces with any Docker image you want, so there's no reason you couldn't use Nix to generate one for use with Codespaces.

The Visual Studio Code server isn't in Nixpkgs/NixOS yet, but there's an out-of-tree effort being maintained here for now: https://github.com/msteen/nixos-vscode-server

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#212

Post by BiteCode_dev »

gosukiwi wrote: post #91

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…

It's funny because we told people not to trust big companies, they tell us we are paranoid, they do it, they pay the price for it, then they say we were right, then they do it again.

MS changed. Google changed. Apple changed. Why do one expect github to never turn evil ? Haven't learned enough from history ?

Don't let them control your entire stack! Don't let anybody control the entire of anything.

There is a difference this time though. This time, most of us will say it only once.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#213

Post by AYBABTME »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #196
AYBABTME wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real problem that Codespace for stuff like the GitHub codebase solves, is not having to bring up the dev environment. Non trivial, organically certifiably grown commercial software has bunch of services that all eat different things in winter. And things like the Rails monolith that GitHub's main service is, have a tendency of being rude to a dev's laptop, squatting the place with whatever port and file they want…

> And things like the Rails monolith that GitHub's main service is, have a tendency of being rude to a dev's laptop FUD. Everything is neatly handled by rvm (or rbenv) and bundler. You can even use gemsets if you want to be really anal about it. It all goes in version-controlled user directories. I keep my main Mac machine, my work Windows machine, and the production Linux boxes all running the same versioned stack j…

What do you mean FUD? Maybe you've got your own way of doing things that works well so far for you with your current projects, but a ton of people don't live with the same experience, and when they do reach a comfortable spot, it's only comfortable until they move to a new set of projects or company.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#214

Post by int_19h »

bndw wrote: post #146

Does Codespaces support offline development? Is an Internet connection now required 100% of the time to write code?

It's still a git repo in the end, so you can use all the usual tools to work with it locally.

You can also use https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/containers to run an identical container locally to reproduce the environment, and then connect to it.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#215

Post by api »

gosukiwi wrote: post #91

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 direction the web is taking is worrisome.

It's 100% economic. "Everything has to be free" means there is no money to be made in selling actual applications. That means the industry pivots to SaaS since the cloud is DRM and by running apps remotely you can charge rent and make piracy impossible. As a bonus you get the user's data, which you can do anything you want with in most cases.

As a bonus SaaS can also claim to be open source if only the client code is open, or if all the code is open but the SaaS still holds all the data and has the network effect. So you get those open source virtue points for free while still locking up the data or the network.

Of course the other response to "everything has to be free" is surveillance capitalism.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#216

Post by toastal »

gosukiwi wrote: post #120
sergiotapia wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :(

I would trust a service by junior devs more if it was hosted by a third-party database because so many companies have insecurely set up their environments over the years. Especially if the data is encrypted in a way the service can't read it, what would be the harm?

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#218

Post by dragonwriter »

msbarnett wrote: post #195
spenczar5 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s an example of a company collapsing in that way? I actually can’t think of any.

These tend to be early stage startups who went with BaaS to get around resource constraints and couldn't survive the rapid need to exfiltrate their data and build a backend with a gun to their head. Larger companies generally have the survival sense not to sharecrop business critical functionality to such a degree. Which is to say, you wouldn't have heard of them, because they never got big enough to be known to anyo…

> Larger companies generally have the survival sense not to sharecrop business critical functionality to such a degree.

Larger companies have also been known to buy out critical service vendors and in-house them when there was a risk that they might otherwise shutdown or pivot, too; that's less often an option fot smaller firms.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#219

Post by cameronbrown »

azth wrote: post #145
kyrra wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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?

(Opinions are my own.)

It used to be entirely custom, but is currently being re-based on VSCode. Overall very similar feel to Codespaces, just tailed for how Google works.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#220

Post by gosukiwi »

apalmer wrote: post #201
gosukiwi wrote: post #91

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…

This may not be what you are referring too BUT I can say as a .Net developer it's amazing how little .Net devs know about how the low level dev related stuff works because visual studio holds there hand. I have blown people's minds by showing them how to just call msbuild or git from the command line etc... I think it's changing since dotnet core took over in that space but had a good 10 year run where generally no o…

Yes, IDEs are similar in a way that they abstract lot of stuff, so people end up depending on them. I don't mind IDEs, but I encourage learning what they actually do behind scenes, so you won't be completely useless when you don't have them.

I think that's one of the biggest issues I have with codespaces.

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