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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

#601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, like Microsoft paid the billions to give it out now for free. Besides, do you want your index funds to do well? Because that's exactly where the proceeds go to.

More than that, github was floundering economically, and Microsoft bought them to ensure continuity, because Microsoft was the single largest user. Don't want to rely on Microsoft for GitHub? The underlying 'git' is open source. Just deal with your git repos raw. No one is forcing you to use github.

Github wasn't profitable but had plenty of marketshare to guarantee more funding.

Also Microsoft has plenty of infrastructure and did not need Github. How do you think Windows and Office were built for decades?

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#602

I feel I'm swimming against the current of contemporary dev practices, but I actually believe trying to run as much of your apps and development locally is important. Not exclusively, but at least from time to time I think shutting off your network connection and seeing what happens is important. It flushes out all sorts of assumptions, especially around dependencies, you may not have realized you had. If you at leas…

Agreed, but for most companies, you're not going to be able to run the whole stack locally.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#603
post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My job now has no ability to run our code locally and its terrible. I work on APIs which at the end of the day is an HTTP server making and responding to requests. When I make a change its impossible to test locally which is terrible. The same issue applies to serverless technologies (at least last when I used them). It was extremely difficult to run serverless services locally, debug issues etc. Having the cloud is…

I can strongly second this. I currently work on a serverless project and running/debugging code locally is one of the biggest pain points. Over time I've gotten better at mocking out a bunch of stuff to try and get the code I care about running, but it's a really rough process. There are of course risks that the local setup process will differ from the prod environment in a serious way. Even with good automated test…

I've used serverless and AWS chalice to build Lambda, and both have have the option to dev locally. That would be a nightmare to have to wait to deploy every time.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#604
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…

They already do with Teams. Of course they will do it here sooner or later as well.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#605

> 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…

I’ve very recently become a GitHub engineer, and I got pre-access to the beta too and I must say - my absolute favourite thing about CoseSpaces is being able to dev on a repo you don’t work on regularly and probably wouldn’t contribute if it meant having to set up environment etc. It’s really nice to just dip into a project with a working environment in seconds, make your PR and then move on.

> . It’s really nice to just dip into a project with a working environment in seconds, make your PR and then move on.

That sounds incredibly useful actually. Is that the main sales pitch for codespaces?

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#606
post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can strongly second this. I currently work on a serverless project and running/debugging code locally is one of the biggest pain points. Over time I've gotten better at mocking out a bunch of stuff to try and get the code I care about running, but it's a really rough process. There are of course risks that the local setup process will differ from the prod environment in a serious way. Even with good automated test…

I've used serverless and AWS chalice to build Lambda, and both have have the option to dev locally. That would be a nightmare to have to wait to deploy every time.

I would love it if you could expand on this. I currently work with AWS Lambdas a lot and have tried a couple options for running them locally but never got to a point where it was worth the effort. For example I use PyCharm and tried getting the aws serverless plugin working with it for running Lambdas and State Machines but just kept running into different problems.

There must be a better approach than setting up a bunch of mocks and running the core logic in a scratch file.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#607
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…

Not that hard to imagine, it's happening already in their other products[0], it's what the management wants.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25198713

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the trick, the git is open, but the metadata is what matters. Issues, PRs, integrations into various code auditing services. That's the whole "extend" bit.

By that logic any proprietary product that provides an interface with an open source tool is guilty. I think accusing MS of EEE in this case is a huge stretch; GitHub is a commercial product that uses a popular open source tool with 100% compatibility (that I'm aware of) and actively participates in the development and features of that tool. When Ms start implementing extensions to git that only work with GitHub, we…

> By that logic any proprietary product that provides an interface with an open source tool is guilty.

In my view, the entire PaaS ecosystem modus operandi is building on top of open hardware & software, allowing and enticing people to move in easily (familiar tech/open source), and making locked-in products out of them. If that's not EEE I don't know what is.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I can use the same workflow with codespaces connected to a local container? Is that documented somewhere?

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/containers

Thanks but I was looking to see if codespaces could somehow be used with a locally running container.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#610
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 your employer decides that they need such an analytics dashboard, one that is spying on every keystroke, then they will have one. That one doesn't depend on you working on a laptop, or in a remote environment - the company owns and is administrating that laptop, and they can install everything they regard as necessary. Therefore the real question is if Codespaces is helping to get your job done; I guess that depen…

On second thought, the move to remote environments may have an interesting side effect: if people are no longer familiar with setting up their local development environments, then it will be a bit harder to set up their own side projects to tinker and try out new stuff; in a reality where everyone is working on a remote/preset environment, we will have just another small, but very significant inhibition to deal with our own side projects.

now there is a bit of an irony - github helped open source, now this development will be very helpful to corporate software developers, but might turn out to be harmful to open source as such.

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