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The Future of the Gitlab Web IDE

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Re: The Future of the Gitlab Web IDE

#51

Post by de_nied »

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?

>As a software engineer, I want local control, where an internet connection is optional.

You can have that even with web browsers. These are called web apps. Of course if they're implemented to be fully offline is up to whoever makes them. But they can be.

https://web.dev/progressive-web-apps/

Re: The Future of the Gitlab Web IDE

#52

Post by didibus »

and0 wrote: post #29
ARandomerDude wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes. Because local development environments...break ALL THE TIME. This seems like more of a process problem than a technology problem. Our company has a simple rule for this: you break it, you fix it -- immediately. As a result, our development process is very stable.

I don't think it's quite that simple. Everywhere I've worked with Javascript, Python, or Ruby you run into a bunch of random issues that happen with a specific MacOS update or some other crazy context. Or the documentation just isn't the company's priority. However I do agree that web-only seems a bit much. Just last night I was doing some company work on my laptop while my power was out (no internet). The nice middl…

Why don't they have devs use Linux laptops? Problem solved.

Just let them run the same OS as prod no?

Or have them use VMWare or Docker.

Re: The Future of the Gitlab Web IDE

#53

Post by diffeomorphism »

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…

Maybe a stupid question, but doesn't the remote environment run basically the same software? Or at least the same software as a local container or VM would? If so, why would this break less often?

Re: The Future of the Gitlab Web IDE

#54

Post by Lutger »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #24
simonw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Yes. Because local development environments...break ALL THE TIME. This seems like more of a process problem than a technology problem. Our company has a simple rule for this: you break it, you fix it -- immediately. As a result, our development process is very stable.

You break it, you spend days on fixing things instead of being somewhat productive, and if you break the codebase, then we wait while you try to fix it, before we need to step in and do it ourselves.

This was sometimes my experience working with and leading teams with devs of varying experience but always full freedom.

Nobody actually likes it.

Re: The Future of the Gitlab Web IDE

#55

Post by kodah »

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…

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

Whatever breaks software environments on the desktop will also break them in a remote compute environment; unless, of course, you put your entire product in a container and use a framework that supports hot code reloading. In which, you can do on a desktop for free.

> 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.

A users browser is still impacted by things running locally. I'm not sure a web-IDE buys you anything except not running file watchers (which is nice).

I never actually questioned the value of a web based IDE until this moment, and that gives me some pause.

Re: The Future of the Gitlab Web IDE

#56

Post by datalopers »

alephnan wrote: post #20

Job titles seem really important to the content here > In this video Paul Slaughter, Staff FE Engineer, walks Eric Schurter, Senior Product Manager

They just erased 4 years of work by simply replacing it with a superior and open-source tool, VS Code. They’ve gotta justify their existence somehow.

Re: The Future of the Gitlab Web IDE

#57

Post by rjzzleep »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #53
simonw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Maybe a stupid question, but doesn't the remote environment run basically the same software? Or at least the same software as a local container or VM would? If so, why would this break less often?

You hit the nail on its head. There is absolutely no reason why the remote environment doesn't have exactly the same issue the local environment has. It will still need its rbenv etc for any sort of ruby/node/python etc versioning.

I think what the person above means when he says "local breaks ALL THE TIME", the reality is that every now and then during major OS updates MacOS may make major breaking changes in system libraries or library locations, which in the past would famously break Ruby on Rails development environments.

There's also the fact that Windows fits in the same category. So when he talks about fixing dev environments what he really means is consolidating the dev environment in linux.

Re: The Future of the Gitlab Web IDE

#58

Post by crossroadsguy »

> These lightweight changes make up the vast majority of the Web IDE usage

Imho, that’s Web Text Editor. It’d be helpful to not mix junior an “editor” with an “IDE”.

If someone at Gitlab is listening then it’d actually be a differentiator to make an IDE (and charge for it) to also those platforms where having a beefy laptop becomes a requirement (eg Android) and developers on those platforms, or a lot of them like me, would love to have a platform online that’s largely independent of a development machine.

Re: The Future of the Gitlab Web IDE

#59

Post by TekMol »

What is the idea here on how to use it for anything but front end development?

When I edit PHP, Python, Ruby, whatever code that is hosted on GitLab via their Web IDE, how am I supposed to see the result when it needs a whole stack with Linux, Apache and MySQL below it to run?

Re: The Future of the Gitlab Web IDE

#60

Post by thunfisch »

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?

Absolutely.

The thing that this allows (and the companies that inspired this stuff, e.g. GitPod) is to codify your development environment - similarly to what has been happening in the infrastructure world. And I'm not talking about editor configs, but the entire toolchain.

Of course, if you're just working on one main project, or a few with a shared toolchain, this won't be adding much value for you. But as soon as the matrix between development environments and projects get bigger, this becomes a huge productivity boost.

Think about a mobile (as in, moves around a lot) developer that uses many different devices - there's no additional work to keep those environments in sync, or set up a new one. It will just work in the browser.

Or a bigger company with many projects and many people (think devops) that need to jump into different projects all the time. I don't want to waste my time setting up the specific toolchain for that project, or even check it out - I can just open up a pre-configured, guaranteed-to-be-working dev environment in the browser in a few seconds and get going. This would by my personal use-case, and I'm super excited to see this happening.

I was already thinking about setting up GitPod for our company GitLab, but if GitLab manages to combine the GitLab CI/CD Runner Session feature with this IDE for background tasks (compilation, terminal, etc), you would get 90% of the awesome-ness of GitPod for free with your regular GitLab setup.

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