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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

#221

Post by blueplanet200 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #187
jordemort wrote: post #131

I wonder why they're not telling the security & compliance side of the story here. Getting rid of local development means they have to worry a lot less about what's going on on their engineers' workstations. They've reduced them to dumb clients; any code going in or out of the repository has to be created, or at least pass through, a VM that GitHub controls. That lets them move the security boundary; I wouldn't be su…

> Getting rid of local development means they have to worry a lot less about what's going on on their engineers' workstations. Wait, what?!? No, it doesn't. Their engineers' workstation software can read or edit their code just as easily as their engineers can. Going into the cloud just adds another liability, it doesn't take any one away.

I don't think so. Software running on your computer has wholesale access to your filesystem.

If those files are accessible only via the web (or if you bother setting up ssh + pubkey, via ssh) that significantly reduces the surface area of possible attacks.

Don't hate on "not being impossible" for "being less likely."

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#222

Post by toastal »

vvoyer wrote: post #186

As much as I’d like to try this, the blog post reads as « our dev environment was so heavy, our git repository so old that we put everything in the cloud even your dev env ». If you’re building a new startup, you don’t need this. Use docker-compose. The current latest full stack project I built requires a single command: npm run dev. Launches docker-compose (PostgreSQL), Next.js and ngrok (expose/webhooks). And it ta…

Or Nix or Guix

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#224

Post by swiley »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #212
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…

It's funny because we told people not to trust big companies, they tell us we are paranoid, they do it, they pay the price for it, then they say we were right, then they do it again. MS changed. Google changed. Apple changed. Why do one expect github to never turn evil ? Haven't learned enough from history ? Don't let them control your entire stack! Don't let anybody control the entire of anything. There is a differe…

It's over once we don't have control of the compilers. Look at the iPhone.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#225

Post by patrickserrano »

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…

> If they start off with things like that, there' so much magic under the hood, they won't understand how anything works.

I feel like there's an ever growing tension in software development where magic like this makes us more productive but also more vulnerable.

Maybe we need to develop better benchmarks for "knowing enough" so when the magic fails, we're not starting at zero trying to figure out what went wrong.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#227

Post by andyp-kw »

bko wrote: post #208
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.

There's plenty of companies that wasted a ton of resources trying to roll their own version of things that should be services. Remember when Uber built their own chat solution? [0] > With operations in over 620 cities, it was paramount for us to identify a chat solution that would enable Uber employees to reliably communicate on desktop and mobile regardless of where they were in the world. Did Uber really need their…

I see your point.

But at Uber's scale I can see the business need for a custom chat app. Most third party chat apps are bloated, both the cheap and expensive ones. Plus there's the need for custom integrations.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#228

Post by yunohn »

Raed667 wrote: post #135
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?

The difference is that you don't pay a monthly subscription to use a garbage collector.

This is already a thing, if you look at Java (old-school ik), Oracle vs OpenJDK [1].

I don’t see why that would be a problem though? If I can pay a company to provide improved GC for my infra, where the cost savings made it beneficial, I would do it…

[1] https://superuser.com/a/1365224

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#229

Post by selykg »

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.

If you read the article, that's an option with Github's code spaces setup.

> Visual Studio Code is great. It’s the primary tool GitHub.com engineers use to interface with codespaces. But asking our Vim and Emacs users to commit to a graphical editor is less great. If Codespaces was our future, we had to bring everyone along.

snip

> From there, GitHub engineers can run Vim, Emacs, or even ed if they so desire.

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