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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

#531

Post by koyote »

tiffanyh wrote: post #90

> "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)

And that's on top of the price for every engineer's machine that is used to access the instance...

Sure, you might not need to buy machines that are as beefy (although I bet you'll still need a decent machine to run all your chrome/electron windows) but enterprise maintenance on these machines is still a significant cost.

I definitely don't think one can look at this from the 'saving money' angle.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#532

Post by maccard »

gmueckl wrote: post #477
munk-a wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is somewhat fair - there aren't great alternatives to migrate issues and the like to today. But all of those bits of metadata are easy to pull out of the service via API hooks. If someone wanted to start a serious competitor to github that shares the same basic data model it'd be pretty trivial to write up migration aides. I don't disbelieve that it's possible for microsoft to severely restrict these - but entir…

There are really simple ways to play dirty with APIs like making sure that they are incomplete in subtle and inconvenient ways like leaving out some of the metadata. Hypothetical example: make it impossible to query tags on issues. You'd still be able to do most things through the API, but if you have a workflow that's heavily dependent on tags, the data is effectively siloed.

So to be clear, the proof the GitHub is extending is a hypothetical example of an incomplete api that is not based on an open standard?

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#533

Post by er4hn »

slownews45 wrote: post #411
bogwog wrote: post #358

Serious 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/unet…

If a business is paying for this product, then THEY (not you) are the customer. And in that context - yes, Microsoft may be asked or build a product for managers to manage their workforce, particularly if remote. This could involve presence tracking, engagement tracking (ie, do you open alerts / read your bug reports) etc. One approach would be to monitor what management considers productive / successful employees an…

> One approach would be to monitor what management considers productive / successful employees and also on employees who have gone on PIP's - then train the AI on that data set.

I look forward to the papers on how to slack off on your job while the AI classifies you as "a straight shooter with upper management written all over him". Possible title: "An adversarial approach to the TwoBobs Productivity Classifier"

(/s if this was not clear)

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#534

Post by koyote »

sharms wrote: post #99
tiffanyh wrote: post #90

> "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)

While that does sound quite expensive, companies typically have a limited budget for employee laptops, but appear to have almost unlimited budget for cloud hosted testing environments, which usually have many instances (and services like RDS / Redis etc)

Our company is the opposite, I have a max-specced laptop and we are actively trying to reduce the massive cost of cloud computing.

A powerful laptop is a drop in the ocean compared to how much cloud VMs cost per developer.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#535

Post by koyote »

smilingsun wrote: post #500

From the article: > The GitHub.com repository is almost 13 GB on disk; simply cloning the repository takes 20 minutes. Their problem seems to be mainly this. Which I'm surprised that they don't fix, but invent a workaround for. Deleting/rewriting a git repo's history is not impossible and often necessary for these kinds of cases.

How often do you clone a repo?

Our monorepo is multiples of that and the last time I cloned it was 2 years ago. When we first moved to git we simply had a 'clean' clone sitting on a network drive that all users could just copy to their machines to get started.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#536

Post by slownews45 »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #482
slownews45 wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a business is paying for this product, then THEY (not you) are the customer. And in that context - yes, Microsoft may be asked or build a product for managers to manage their workforce, particularly if remote. This could involve presence tracking, engagement tracking (ie, do you open alerts / read your bug reports) etc. One approach would be to monitor what management considers productive / successful employees an…

I really hope that if this happens, DPAs bring the hammer down on everyone involved (both MS and companies using it) in a useful timeframe (i.e. before it has become socially acceptable because "everyone is doing it" and there are no consequences).

Do you have a right to privacy in the workplace?

Back in the day the boss would be right there with you in the store etc and could watch you all the time.

Or maybe this will be something that really only shows up in china etc? I think they are a bit further along on some of these types of things.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#538

Post by greenyouse »

brundolf wrote: post #272
JoeQuery wrote: post #243

I've developed on a remote server for about 8 years now. It started when I was a contractor and my machine was simply too slow to run the project I was assigned. I did not have the money for a new laptop, but I could afford the ~55/month for a dedicated server with 32GB and 4cores. I have worked that way ever since. I've been fortunate enough to work at companies that run their own VM infrastructure which allow me to…

I recently set up a home Linux server and I've been doing my personal projects on it via VSCode's remote development (from my MacBook and my Windows desktop). The server isn't actually as powerful as those machines, but the convenience of having a single env regardless of client has still been fantastic (not to mention getting all the Linux niceties despite working from Windows). Doing it in the cloud probably carrie…

Agreed, this setup is super nice for personal work! Adding a raspberry pi as a jump box with wake on lan saves some money on electricity too. I've been using that with a big desktop computer instead of a server and it pretty much works for remote development while out of the house.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#539

Post by syspec »

stnmtn wrote: post #469
lilyball wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a problem that can be solved without Codespaces too. For example, if GitHub were to embrace Nix, every project could have a shell.nix file for all of their dependencies, and the new engineer bootstrap script that installs Nix could then just add an internal Nix binary cache (or use Cachix). Any time the shell.nix changes a GitHub Action could push the closure to the binary cache. With this setup, you can use…

-insert comment about that hacker news comment about how dropbox could be replicated with linux here-

- I see comment about iPod, no wireless, less space than a nomad. lame

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#540

Post by NoahKAndrews »

ramraj07 wrote: post #346
hbn wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny timing to announce this the day after a major outage that took down practically the entire platform

It’s very likely them doing pre rollout operations for this feature is actually what caused that outage though.

They're not announcing a new feature with this blog post, are they?
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