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The Future of the Gitlab Web IDE

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Re: The Future of the Gitlab Web IDE

#11

Post by philliphaydon »

btgeekboy wrote: post #8
philliphaydon wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss c9 which was bought by Amazon. It had a VM running behind it with a terminal so I was able to do .net core development. A couple times I wasn't home and wanted to fix a bug in my project so I was able to login to c9, spin up my project in the browser and it committed back to github.

It’s still around - https://aws.amazon.com/cloud9/ Personally, I’m using Tailscale + VS Code with the Remote-SSH plug-in, accessing my home server.

Yup but no free tier now :D not paying for it for open source dev stuff. Rather just run the IDE on my laptop. Was handy when using someone elses computer.

Re: The Future of the Gitlab Web IDE

#12

Post by daenz »

Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't want to do all development-related tasks in my web browser. As a software engineer, I want local control, where an internet connection is optional. I want to be able to experiment with the software in various local setups. I just don't get why Gitlab thinks this is a good idea worth a huge amount of engineering effort. Are people really clamoring for this feature?

Re: The Future of the Gitlab Web IDE

#13

Post by simonw »

daenz wrote: post #12

Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't want to do all development-related tasks in my web browser. As a software engineer, I want local control, where an internet connection is optional. I want to be able to experiment with the software in various local setups. I just don't get why Gitlab thinks this is a good idea worth a huge amount of engineering effort. Are people really clamoring for this feature?

> Are people really clamoring for this feature?

Yes. Because local development environments (at least for the languages I work with, Python and JavaScript) break ALL THE TIME.

With 20+ years of experience I can just about keep my own laptop ticking over - but it takes work, and every time I mentor a new learner this is the number one sticking point.

The browser-based cloud IDE experience, where it doesn't matter what you've got going on with your laptop, you just visit a URL and start work, is an incredible productivity boost for the vast majority of people.

When I think about how much time was wasted on broken personal development environments at my last big employer (several hundred engineers)... I reckon the lost productivity was easily in the low millions of dollars per year.

Re: The Future of the Gitlab Web IDE

#14

Post by slimsag »

simonw wrote: post #13
daenz wrote: post #12

Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't want to do all development-related tasks in my web browser. As a software engineer, I want local control, where an internet connection is optional. I want to be able to experiment with the software in various local setups. I just don't get why Gitlab thinks this is a good idea worth a huge amount of engineering effort. Are people really clamoring for this feature?

> Are people really clamoring for this feature? Yes. Because local development environments (at least for the languages I work with, Python and JavaScript) break ALL THE TIME. With 20+ years of experience I can just about keep my own laptop ticking over - but it takes work, and every time I mentor a new learner this is the number one sticking point. The browser-based cloud IDE experience, where it doesn't matter what…

Combine this with the fact that there is massive $ opportunity with monitoring devs (worst case) and having a monopoly over their working environment (best case)

AND with the fact that management in most companies 100% wants the productivity/onboarding gains of these products.

I hate how broken dev environments always are. This is one answer, and IMO it will work initially and lead to quite bad outcomes for us devs long term.

Re: The Future of the Gitlab Web IDE

#15

Post by daenz »

simonw wrote: post #13
daenz wrote: post #12

Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't want to do all development-related tasks in my web browser. As a software engineer, I want local control, where an internet connection is optional. I want to be able to experiment with the software in various local setups. I just don't get why Gitlab thinks this is a good idea worth a huge amount of engineering effort. Are people really clamoring for this feature?

> Are people really clamoring for this feature? Yes. Because local development environments (at least for the languages I work with, Python and JavaScript) break ALL THE TIME. With 20+ years of experience I can just about keep my own laptop ticking over - but it takes work, and every time I mentor a new learner this is the number one sticking point. The browser-based cloud IDE experience, where it doesn't matter what…

The ailments you describe can be resolved by having a small dedicated Developer Experience team. Their mission is to ensure that developers can ramp up quickly with deterministic environments and keep a high velocity with developer tooling. If a big company doesn't have one, they're messing up.

I see the benefits of having something that "always works" though the browser, but for me, the lack of control does not outweigh this convenience. I mean, can you even step through a debugger session? That's a basic requirement imo.

Re: The Future of the Gitlab Web IDE

#16

Post by sesteel »

daenz wrote: post #12

Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't want to do all development-related tasks in my web browser. As a software engineer, I want local control, where an internet connection is optional. I want to be able to experiment with the software in various local setups. I just don't get why Gitlab thinks this is a good idea worth a huge amount of engineering effort. Are people really clamoring for this feature?

You are not alone. If I was made to use this, I'd probably retire early or change careers. Trends towards centralization and uniformity make me sad.

Re: The Future of the Gitlab Web IDE

#17

Post by ar_lan »

simonw wrote: post #13
daenz wrote: post #12

Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't want to do all development-related tasks in my web browser. As a software engineer, I want local control, where an internet connection is optional. I want to be able to experiment with the software in various local setups. I just don't get why Gitlab thinks this is a good idea worth a huge amount of engineering effort. Are people really clamoring for this feature?

> Are people really clamoring for this feature? Yes. Because local development environments (at least for the languages I work with, Python and JavaScript) break ALL THE TIME. With 20+ years of experience I can just about keep my own laptop ticking over - but it takes work, and every time I mentor a new learner this is the number one sticking point. The browser-based cloud IDE experience, where it doesn't matter what…

Nix solves this exact problem you've described.

Re: The Future of the Gitlab Web IDE

#18

Post by stackbutterflow »

daenz wrote: post #12

Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't want to do all development-related tasks in my web browser. As a software engineer, I want local control, where an internet connection is optional. I want to be able to experiment with the software in various local setups. I just don't get why Gitlab thinks this is a good idea worth a huge amount of engineering effort. Are people really clamoring for this feature?

And as usual for these type of things it'll be made by macbook users for macbook users. It'll be sluggish on non top-of-the-line computers. Meanwhile my vim setup works on a potato laptop just fine.

Re: The Future of the Gitlab Web IDE

#19

Post by arvinsim »

daenz wrote: post #12

Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't want to do all development-related tasks in my web browser. As a software engineer, I want local control, where an internet connection is optional. I want to be able to experiment with the software in various local setups. I just don't get why Gitlab thinks this is a good idea worth a huge amount of engineering effort. Are people really clamoring for this feature?

It's not just you. Morever, there are very strong business incentives to lock in software development to be only on the browser.
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