IIUC, facebook has being doing this for a long time with devservers
GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces
351–360 of 704 posts
Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see your point. But at Uber's scale I can see the business need for a custom chat app. Most third party chat apps are bloated, both the cheap and expensive ones. Plus there's the need for custom integrations.
I used to work at a large bank and they operated perfectly fine with Window's messenger. As does every other bank in the US, despite having tens if not hundred of thousands of employees. Some things require more specialized features like trade tickets (which Bloomberg does), but for chatting, you're not gonna be able to build a better solution than already exists. And if you can, then you should spin that off into it…
> but for chatting, you're not gonna be able to build a better solution than already exists. And if you can, then you should spin that off into its own business like Goldman did with Symphony
The implication that Symphony is a better solution for chatting than already exists / existed.
As a (non-trading) user of the platform, I strongly disagree.
I don't know what the traders think, but I'd hope there's a USP in there for them besides "it's cheaper than a Bloomberg seat."
Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces
#353So you're telling me that the next GitHub outage could take out my dev environment and give me an afternoon off? Time to convince management that we need to switch to Codespaces!
There are different risks, but there is not necessarily more risk. Does Codespaces have lower or higher than the availability risks of your current environment?
Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces
#354> My friends, I’m here to tell you I was a Codespaces skeptic before this started and now I am not. This is the way. ~@iolsen I don't actually doubt that this (and the 4 other glowing employee quotes) are real, but even assuming they are, I can understand people remaining skeptical about the sample size of 5 being broadly representative of the 100s (1000s?) of engineers at the company. Also slightly hilarious that "T…
Not about Codespaces, but about Web IDEs in general, they're amazing. I've not used Codespaces but I have used what is being talked about here [0]. It's one of the biggest productivity improvements I've seen from Google. I never really have to think about what packages or software is setup on my laptop and I can change laptops or computers while having the entire state of my IDE preserved. It's a pretty amazing experience.
The only people who I don't think would instantly like this sort of thing are people like game developers who basically don't do any unit testing of their code and run the binaries they generate. For those users you could find quite a few ways around that.
[0] - https://www.quora.com/What-does-Googles-web-IDE-look-like
Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces
#355> "So we moved to 32 core, 64 GB RAM VMs. By changing a single line of configuration, we upgraded every engineer’s machine." On GitHub, that instance type is $2.88/hour or $2,073 monthly per developer for a single instance. (Granted, that's running 24/7 but still - wow, that's expensive for a single instance)
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 r…
Even with Codespace your company will still have to buy you a laptop, to run corporate VPN, security/virus software, background screen recording, and zoom/video calls. All of this will still need powerful reliable business grade laptop.
The cost difference between laptop meant for remote development vs regular dev laptop is less than $1k. ($300 for CPU upgrade, $200 for RAM, $200 for SSD upgrade)?
Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces
#356I've had this vision for over a decade and it is awesome to see we are finally making measurable progress towards it. What I'd really like to see is a WebRTC type interface that overlays this to provide some kind of collaborative environment on top of it. I'm thinking of a built in voice chat as well as multi-author editing within the same codespace. Imagine it like pair programming. I'm in FileA.ts and I can see a l…
> _I'm thinking of a built in voice chat as well as multi-author editing within the same Codespace._
You should try Live Share! VS Code Live Share enables you to collaboratively edit and debug with others in real time, regardless what programming languages you're using or app types you're building. It also supports voice chat:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MS-vsliv...
Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also a sample of people who, if they run into issues with Codespaces, are just a Slack message away from someone who can fix it.
Do you know whether they use the public Codespaces or a customized version?
I don't. My initial comment is assuming they use the public version. Whether they use the public or a private version they still have back-channels for support that the rest of us don't have access to.
Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces
#358Serious question: if I were to use this, would Microsoft collect analytics on me (code written, keystrokes, mouse movements, sleep/work schedule, productivity metrics, etc) and monetize that data by using it to build some AI product like Copilot, or build a productivity dashboard so managers can fire people for not being productive enough (like Xsolla did), use it to serve me ads, or do some stupid/irresponsible/unethical thing with it that will ultimately end up hurting me in the long run?
Because I feel like the answer to that is yes, and I can already see myself in the future writing something angry in the comments section of an article on HN that exposes some evil/stupid shit Microsoft did with this, or happened as a result of this.
I'm not against the concept of using a thin client for development, but it just doesn't seem smart to me do it in such a way where you have to place trust in a company that, throughout their entire existence, has consistently proven that you should not trust them, because they have no incentive to (and thus never will) act in your best interests. It's like if Facebook released their own web browser and "promised" to respect your privacy; you'd be an idiot to believe them.
Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces
#359This article does an excellent job motivating the problem! not sure if it is the solution but very curious
Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never seen a company collapse because their garbage collector posted an Our Incredible Journey™ blog post and then shut down a week later. I have seen multiple companies collapse because the proprietary Backend-as-a-Service they built their sand castle on top of pulled a vanishing act, however.
I am not concerned with Microsoft posting an Our Incredible Journey (TM) blog post within my lifetime, but duly noted.
Big companies put projects to rest all of the time. There are even whole sites with countdowns and all.