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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

#191

Post by tshaddox »

thomascgalvin wrote: post #39
pegler wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am wary of requiring an internet connection in order to develop, but there seem to be more and more advantages to using something like Codespaces. The article describes using pretty much any IDE, so they are just offloading the setup and running of the development environment to the cloud while letting you run your preferred IDE locally.

An internet connection is already required for dependency management and stack overflow. I already develop with an always-on connection.

An internet connection is also required for fairly important things like pushing your code, giving and receiving code reviews, etc.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#192

Post by sundbry »

jstx1 wrote: post #26

Is the direction in which all software development is heading?

No. You can achieve the same benefits of local reproducibility with Nix/Guix. Guix is more composable IMO because you can program multi-service development environments entirely in scheme.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#193

Post by upbeat_general »

AYBABTME wrote: post #138
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…

The real problem that Codespace for stuff like the GitHub codebase solves, is not having to bring up the dev environment. Non trivial, organically certifiably grown commercial software has bunch of services that all eat different things in winter. And things like the Rails monolith that GitHub's main service is, have a tendency of being rude to a dev's laptop, squatting the place with whatever port and file they want…

I believe codespaces does directly rely on docker containers that you can customize…

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#194

Post by whymauri »

msbarnett wrote: post #153
keithwhor wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same thing was said about every programming abstraction to ever be introduced. How do we expect people to build memory-efficient applications when they become reliant on a garbage collector?

I've never seen a company collapse because their garbage collector posted an Our Incredible Journey™ blog post and then shut down a week later. I have seen multiple companies collapse because the proprietary Backend-as-a-Service they built their sand castle on top of pulled a vanishing act, however.

I am not concerned with Microsoft posting an Our Incredible Journey (TM) blog post within my lifetime, but duly noted.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#195

Post by msbarnett »

spenczar5 wrote: post #175
msbarnett wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen a company collapse because their garbage collector posted an Our Incredible Journey™ blog post and then shut down a week later. I have seen multiple companies collapse because the proprietary Backend-as-a-Service they built their sand castle on top of pulled a vanishing act, however.

What’s an example of a company collapsing in that way? I actually can’t think of any.

These tend to be early stage startups who went with BaaS to get around resource constraints and couldn't survive the rapid need to exfiltrate their data and build a backend with a gun to their head. Larger companies generally have the survival sense not to sharecrop business critical functionality to such a degree.

Which is to say, you wouldn't have heard of them, because they never got big enough to be known to anyone beyond a handful of clients and employees. I've personally been hired to try to rescue such a company, and was not successful.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#196

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

AYBABTME wrote: post #138
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…

The real problem that Codespace for stuff like the GitHub codebase solves, is not having to bring up the dev environment. Non trivial, organically certifiably grown commercial software has bunch of services that all eat different things in winter. And things like the Rails monolith that GitHub's main service is, have a tendency of being rude to a dev's laptop, squatting the place with whatever port and file they want…

> And things like the Rails monolith that GitHub's main service is, have a tendency of being rude to a dev's laptop

FUD. Everything is neatly handled by rvm (or rbenv) and bundler. You can even use gemsets if you want to be really anal about it. It all goes in version-controlled user directories. I keep my main Mac machine, my work Windows machine, and the production Linux boxes all running the same versioned stack just fine.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#197

Post by io »

swiley wrote: post #125
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.

Quotee here. I agree! I use tmux and vim via ssh for github.com development in Codespaces.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#198

Post by geofft »

didibus wrote: post #149
dividedbyzero wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...

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 NT API.

Most of the examples on that wiki page have been unsuccessful (IE trying to EEE HTML, Outlook trying to EEE SMTP, etc.), because they weren't able to get enough people to rely on the extended version and stop using the standard thing.

What is the analogy here? Microsoft wants to embrace and extend... compiling software? and will kill off... existing ways of compiling software? How will this work?

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#199

Post by Fordec »

minimaxir wrote: post #15
blueplanet200 wrote: post #3

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

I'm in the GitHub Codespaces personal beta: counterintuitively, the UI/UX of Codespaces is as performant as VS Code on the desktop.

To my mind that's more of an indictment of VS Code than a recommendation for Codespaces.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#200

Post by BiteCode_dev »

AYBABTME wrote: post #138
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…

The real problem that Codespace for stuff like the GitHub codebase solves, is not having to bring up the dev environment. Non trivial, organically certifiably grown commercial software has bunch of services that all eat different things in winter. And things like the Rails monolith that GitHub's main service is, have a tendency of being rude to a dev's laptop, squatting the place with whatever port and file they want…

Sure. Until you get your account banned because you went againts of obscure TOS clause, or because a powerful entity put pressure or paid their way into it.

Can't wait for the equivalent of abusive dmca to be able to put down your entire dev team.

It's really a way out of madness.

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