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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

#681

Post by donmcronald »

didibus wrote: post #677
geofft wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are they embracing, how are they extending it, and how do they plan to extinguish it? My understanding of EEE is that it involves taking some competitive product/standard, making a cool MS version of it, and then killing off the standard version - e.g. implementing a barely sufficient POSIX layer on Windows, getting customers who have "POSIX" as a purchasing requirement to switch, and then getting them onto the…

They first embraced web standards by building a web based open source IDE called VSCode to get people to convert to it over using Visual Studio. Now that they attracted people to use it, they embraced Linux containers and offered managed dev containers as a service over it called Codespaces running all on Azure. At this point, it's all good, this is how a company profits on open source and standards. But now they are…

I think the 3rd E is more likely "extort" these days. They won't extinguish it, but you'll be paying per user per month forever and the prices will always go up, up, up.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#682

Post by 015a »

cameronbrown wrote: post #672
djanogo wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

I think a lot of these things are less important by the day though. Are VPNs or advanced security software even necessary if everything is in Notion/Google Docs and something like Codespaces is being used?

End-device security is always important; there would be nothing to stop the compromise and lift of, for example, cookies stored in the browser, or a keylogger to grab passwords.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#683

Post by Tainnor »

KronisLV wrote: post #476
blacktriangle wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github does not need to be open source. Open source needs to pull its head out of its collective ass and not hand over its entire workflow to private companies. Github may be the single greatest execution of embrace/extend/extinguish in computing history.

> Open source needs to pull its head out of its collective ass and not hand over its entire workflow to private companies. Well, for starters, there is GitLab which attempts to do a lot of what GitHub does, while allowing you to self host it: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab In some respects, i'd say that it does things better, for example, GitLab CI seems way easier to use in comparison to GitHub Actions: https:…

GitLab CI is not only easier to use , it also isn't a half-baked product like GitHub Actions.

For example, GH Actions don't support YAML anchors but also have basically no other way of cutting down on repetition in your CI config files (actions can't call other actions, for example), so your CI config is full of brittle boilerplate.

Also noteworthy is how you can't rerun single actions. If your deployment failed, you might have to rerun the whole workflow, including the 10 min test run.

Meanwhile, if you use dependabot, PRs issued by that tool have no access to secrets, so if you need to connect to e.g. AWS to run tests, you need to implement weird workarounds.

I don't understand why GitHub is so popular, GitLab seems like such a better tool and it's also developed totally in the open. Some of the CI stuff is literally amazing (e.g. merge trains).

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#684

Post by manigandham »

aitchnyu wrote: post #653
manigandham wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Wow. I have memories reading Github is a bootstrapped, profitable and dominant 90 person company. What happened to profitability?

Venture capital happened: https://archive.is/1t6qi

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#685

Post by crusty »

manigandham wrote: post #598
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

You don't have the same rights to privacy when performing your job for a corporation, and everyone else is already doing it in other industries. Just this week was a big story about how a call center provider (used by Apple and others) was forcing employees to install cameras in their own homes to monitor their remote work: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/big-tech-call-center-...

I was just going to mention customer service reps, who traditionally would have worked out of call centers and been subject to restrictions to make it more difficult for them to steal customer data (with the side 'benefit' of micromanaging productivity). With the pandemic, businesses that had considered CS staff they couldn't replace with AI as not sitting for remote were forced to figure out a way, and that way was essentially to replicate many of the security conditions of the call centers in the home, rationalized as a necessity to keep people employed and get through the pandemic. But let's be real, CS has long been a race to the bottom cost segment, often outsourced and run as a computer with a mere human overlay. So it was only a matter of time before management was satisfied that the security risks were mitigated enough to justify the new coat savings. Some big companies have already decided to stick with the home-based support setups they put in place only because of the pandemic. And now to apply the formula elsewhere.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#686

Post by kansface »

simonw wrote: post #675
pm90 wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the OP is referring to "local stack" i.e. being able to run a single command e.g. `make up` (if you're using makefiles) to spawn a local environment and run a "local" version of the site i.e. serving on localhost. Having such scripts enables one to quickly setup a local environment to make changes and test them before submitting a Pull Request.

I've tried fixing the local dev stack - all of the scripts and Docker containers in the world still can't predict the ways in which something might break when it's running on 100+ different laptops with different developers with different unique preferences for how they like to get things done. My expectation is that if you roll out something like Codespaces a small minority of your engineers will resist because it d…

If the solution is to force everyone to do everything the same way... that's a political solution, not technical. That solution could just as easily have been everyone is forced to do everything the same way on their local machine. Maybe its more politically expedient to move everyone to a completely different cloud stack than to fix/standardize the local one.

> My expectation is that if you roll out something like Codespaces a small minority of your engineers will resist because it doesn't fit exactly how they want to work.

I'd expect internal support to be highly dependent on how terrible the alternative is. Beyond personal preferences, I'm really apprehensive about coupling all dev work to a single remote cloud provider. What happens if you lose internet access or when they inevitably go offline? In the case of the later, literally all work stops.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#687

Post by rhn_mk1 »

maccard wrote: post #660
amatecha wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know how they added Github CLI[0], right? There may be a time where you must use Github CLI instead of a "standard" git client to interact with Github projects. That would be the "extinguish" phase. Right now they have embraced and are extending (such as with Github CLI). [0] https://cli.github.com/

I made this comment elsewhere [0], but by this logic anyone who builds an ecosystem for an open source tool should be accused of the EEE strategy. > There may be a time where you must use Github CLI instead of a "standard" git client to interact with Github projects So we're accusing MS of a slippery slope based on a phrase from 25 years ago, which there is absolutely zero proof or indication of them pursuing in the…

In practice, it doesn't matter what an "actual" extension looks like, but how your product is viewed by customers, because those are the ones you want to lock in. And judging by HN comments, to very many people, Git means Github, making it an extension, if not outright a synonym.

And their extending has nothing to do with open standards, which is worrying due to the potential to create lock-in.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#688

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

manigandham wrote: post #598
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

You don't have the same rights to privacy when performing your job for a corporation, and everyone else is already doing it in other industries. Just this week was a big story about how a call center provider (used by Apple and others) was forcing employees to install cameras in their own homes to monitor their remote work: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/big-tech-call-center-...

In the US, or in Europe?

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#689

Post by octaonalocto »

kansface wrote: post #686
simonw wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried fixing the local dev stack - all of the scripts and Docker containers in the world still can't predict the ways in which something might break when it's running on 100+ different laptops with different developers with different unique preferences for how they like to get things done. My expectation is that if you roll out something like Codespaces a small minority of your engineers will resist because it d…

If the solution is to force everyone to do everything the same way... that's a political solution, not technical. That solution could just as easily have been everyone is forced to do everything the same way on their local machine. Maybe its more politically expedient to move everyone to a completely different cloud stack than to fix/standardize the local one. > My expectation is that if you roll out something like C…

I work at a F50 that has a similar home grown solution. The nice thing is team members can customize their local machine however they want! Then for the actual dev env, its standard.

Works really really well when you allow your employees to explore and do what they want locally. Then when things break or go wrong (either I tweak something, or an incompatible Apple update lands) - I can just reset to the same dev env as everyone else.

It's fantastic. Spin up and throw away a dev env that is so much more powerful than my local machine could be (100+ GB RAM machines are a click away).

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#690

Post by ChicagoDave »

prirun wrote: post #671
maccard wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are we seeing the extend or extinguish with GitHub? It's been 3.5 years and GitHub is just as compatible with git as it has ever been.

Microsoft plays a very long game. 3-4 years is not enough time to boil a frog; it takes much longer or the frog will realize what's happening. Be patient. Give them 10-15 years after their "We love Linux" shift and you'll see. They love it so much, they will own it. Just think of Microsoft like the Borg.

Microsoft is a trillion dollar company in large part because they embraced open source. Azure is extraordinarily profitable.

Why would they fuck with their number one audience, developers?

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