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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

#121

Post by iruoy »

tiffanyh wrote: post #90

> "So we moved to 32 core, 64 GB RAM VMs. By changing a single line of configuration, we upgraded every engineer’s machine." On GitHub, that instance type is $2.88/hour or $2,073 monthly per developer for a single instance. (Granted, that's running 24/7 but still - wow, that's expensive for a single instance)

I assume they're getting quite a sizable discount being owned by Microsoft.

I do wonder how many VM's they have running though at different points of the day and how many spares they have prepared.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#122

Post by cle »

gosukiwi wrote: post #91

Ugh, now not only you don't own your code ( ahem copilot cough ) you also don't own the tools to develop code. The direction the web is taking is worrisome. The issue is not so much senior devs, but new devs. If they start off with things like that, there' so much magic under the hood, they won't understand how anything works. They don't understand they don't own shit until it's too late. I remember when I first saw…

Given the whole outrage over Apple taking advantage of customers' willingness to hand over control of their phones to them, I hope folks can see the parallels here and reject this.

At this point Microsoft's strategy around GitHub, VS Code, Copilot, etc. should be pretty obvious, and we should all be running for the hills.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#123

Post by blueplanet200 »

mastax wrote: post #93
blueplanet200 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says they support web based development, or ssh'ing into the codespaces machine. There are other IDEs besides VS Code and shell based ones.

Don't most IDE's have the ability to edit remote files over SSH? I know VSCode can, and I remember reading a comment from an emacs user doing that. It looks like IntelliJ can do that too, though it seems to edit local copies of files and sync over SSH. There's also SSHFS, though I don't know how good of an experience that is. It can be a pain to set up, but is it more of a pain than setting up a dev environment the o…

Good point! I suspect the issue will be running tests. From what I gather they did all this to save developers the pain of compiling ruby gems + specific stuff on your environment (which can be a huge pain...)

If you edit a file using some sync over ssh option, and want to run a test - how do you proceed? And how is this not the same thing as just checking out the git repo locally in the first place?

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#124

Post by samlambert »

gosukiwi wrote: post #91

Ugh, now not only you don't own your code ( ahem copilot cough ) you also don't own the tools to develop code. The direction the web is taking is worrisome. The issue is not so much senior devs, but new devs. If they start off with things like that, there' so much magic under the hood, they won't understand how anything works. They don't understand they don't own shit until it's too late. I remember when I first saw…

Such a stale take. Can I assume you are pretty much against the cloud in general?

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#125

Post by swiley »

lucideer wrote: post #22

> 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 think people like not having their physical machine tied to their dev environment. IMO "the way" to do this is with ssh and tmux, not a web app. As long as people have choices I guess it doesn't matter.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#126

Post by dividedbyzero »

cle wrote: post #122
gosukiwi wrote: post #91

Ugh, now not only you don't own your code ( ahem copilot cough ) you also don't own the tools to develop code. The direction the web is taking is worrisome. The issue is not so much senior devs, but new devs. If they start off with things like that, there' so much magic under the hood, they won't understand how anything works. They don't understand they don't own shit until it's too late. I remember when I first saw…

Given the whole outrage over Apple taking advantage of customers' willingness to hand over control of their phones to them, I hope folks can see the parallels here and reject this. At this point Microsoft's strategy around GitHub, VS Code, Copilot, etc. should be pretty obvious, and we should all be running for the hills.

> At this point Microsoft's strategy around GitHub, VS Code, etc. should be pretty obvious

As someone not following this closely, what would that strategy be?

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#127

Post by kchr »

kyrra wrote: post #38
blueplanet200 wrote: post #3

I would quit so fast if my company forced me to use a web IDE.

(googler, opinions are my own). Google allows for normal desktop IDEs, plus having a web based one. The funny thing is, many people move to the web based one because it is so good. But Google is also unique in how piper/citc[0] (our source control) works. It's effectively designed for web/cloud based style development, so the workflow for web based dev and desktop dev are effectively the same. So web dev can work, bu…

Interesting, can you elaborate a bit on "cloud-based" development vs for example a traditional workflow of git and a central repo?

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#128

Post by lostintangent »

aaaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #119

Now it will be pretty easy to bring back those pesky remote workers to the offices. They will just tweak some code on the backend and poof , the latency of your home connection skyrockets to the point of typing becoming impossible. Luckily there won’t be such an issue with the office internet! I guess we’ll have to come back to the office to keep being productive in this web-based IDE :^)

I have some of the worst home wifi possible, and have been comfortably developing from Codespaces for over 6 months :)

Editing happens locally in the client (and is synced to the service in parallel), and so you shouldn’t notice any latency when typing.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#129

Post by soylentgraham »

ejdyksen wrote: post #45
andyp-kw wrote: post #11

I'm currently working on a huge codebase that takes forever to compile. I'd love to use Codespaces or a self hosted alternative so that I don't need to carry around a heavy i7 laptop. Being able to develop in the cloud from a browser opens up the possibility to develop from a thin Chromebook.

You can do this right now with the Remote SSH extension for VS Code: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod...

I use this for developing on linux/pi/jetsons, (need to test linking against real libs, and cross compiling for some reason still isnt a thing), but the compile times are terrible...

I wish this was even more modular so we could have a dumb compile farm, +local ide +run&debug on-device (I've recently got 90% closer by remote sshing with vs code to a pi vm)

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#130

Post by uluyol »

Seems like the next step is to avoid downloading the full repository on every machine. If you had it stored on a few machines in the same DC (keep hot files in memory), you could just fetch things on demand with little latency penalty.

Though a lot of people seem to have issues with FUSE filesystems.

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