Live data from Hacker News

Thinkserver: My web-based coding environment

checkmyworking.com

11–20 of 68 posts

Re: Thinkserver: My web-based coding environment

#12
This might be a serious problem for tinkering platforms such as Glitch and Kinopio [1]. They are awesome, but they strongly inspire me to take creativity just a little step further and build my own implementation.

This then leads to a fragmented landscape of such services, and none gets enough traction to grow into seriously sustainable popularity.

[1] https://kinopio.club/

Re: Thinkserver: My web-based coding environment

#13
post #5

This is awesome. I’ve also built a number of services for myself (Pinterest style photo hosting for archival/research purposes, analytics service for my websites, tracker for the books I’ve read, message board for micro communities I’m a part of, etc). I also share them with friends who express interest in them. The costs are minimal (they all run on a shared $4/mo instance + $10/yr domain per project) and I get to c…

Same.

Since Claude 3.5 Sonnet has been released I've been building a lot of "microservices" that are just useful to me, or Chrome Extensions that I've seen that I just recreated using Cursor. Awesome learning experience and now I can customize them as needed.

Re: Thinkserver: My web-based coding environment

#14
Fantastic. This is something I've thought about doing too. There are days where visual studio's shenanigans make me consider the benefits of a bespoke web based UI very strongly.

With libraries like ace and codemirror available, the hard part is mostly on the server with managing state and integrating tools.

I use C#/.NET for everything, so I'd lean on the Roslyn APIs to handle code completion, reference tracking, workspaces, debugging, etc.

Re: Thinkserver: My web-based coding environment

#16
Like other folks here I also made something similar for myself. It started as a jsbin clone, but then I wanted to play with tweaking the environment itself. So now it's become a single editable directory tree where both the editor and the actual projects/demos share common parts of code, all synced between local storage and the server. If I break the editor and refresh the page, there's a simpler alternative editor backup to fix it. Lots of fun with such setup!

Here's a screenshot with the editor showing a preview when editing itself: https://imgur.com/a/RxMCrlf

Re: Thinkserver: My web-based coding environment

#18

This is so reminiscent of doing web development in smalltalk with seaside.

Every time I see a smalltalk comment I hope to see a reply along the lines of

> I've been maintaining a Smalltalk compiler,

But alas. I wonder how hard it is to get a copy of the spec...

Re: Thinkserver: My web-based coding environment

#19
post #4

I've recently discovered the joys of vscode-server[0] for this type of use case. Which you can either serve as a WebApp direct from your machine, or tunnel in from another VSCode instance - including a webhosted version from Microsoft[1] I may not do that much coding these days, but I already have found it handy for when I forgot to do a Git push! Just log back in to the Web Environment and everything is how I left i…

There’s also code-server by Coder, which you can just run on your own server and open in browser directly. It’s also open source (most tunneling features in VSCode aren’t). https://github.com/coder/code-server There’s a one-click setup for it in Lunni, a Docker dashboard I’ve been working on (shameless plug): https://lunni.dev/

As someone who doesn't code professionally, what is the primary use case that leads to significant daily enhancements for developers?

Re: Thinkserver: My web-based coding environment

#20
post #13
post #5

This is awesome. I’ve also built a number of services for myself (Pinterest style photo hosting for archival/research purposes, analytics service for my websites, tracker for the books I’ve read, message board for micro communities I’m a part of, etc). I also share them with friends who express interest in them. The costs are minimal (they all run on a shared $4/mo instance + $10/yr domain per project) and I get to c…

Same. Since Claude 3.5 Sonnet has been released I've been building a lot of "microservices" that are just useful to me, or Chrome Extensions that I've seen that I just recreated using Cursor. Awesome learning experience and now I can customize them as needed.

I think you mean that you've been building a lot of simple applications? Because that's not really what microservices are.

I mean sure it's just a word and HN especially loves to spit on original definitions, but it is always kinda jarring to hear these technical terms in settings that have pretty much no overlap with the original definition.

Post reply on HN