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GitLab Web IDE

about.gitlab.com

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Re: GitLab Web IDE

#231

Post by veidr »

shadowmint wrote: post #229
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because it's unified at the presentation layer doesn't mean its design doesn't follow the Unix philosophy. The problem is that even if the web was composable (`gitlab.com | jenkins.com | tee cloud.google.com aws.amazon.com`), it probably wouldn't be accessible to most users. Unix philosophy is great for system builders, but system users want the car, not the tools and parts.

Says who? This kind of ‘user centric’ justification is rubbish and we all know it. What this is, pure and simpe, is ‘throw it at a wall and see what sticks’. Maybe people will like it and they’ll run with it, or maybe people will hate it and it’ll get binned. Fair enough; but its got zippo to do with user quality of life or what users actually want; its just easier to justify value by adding features than fixing exis…

People do want this. If you asked me what I want, in terms of software, a great cloud IDE is near the top of my list.

I didn’t want this before I had kids, though. But now that I do, I greatly value being able to stop work suddenly, even in the middle of a line of code, and then resume what I was doing sometime in the future, somewhere else and on a different device.

So: different people want different things, and the things people want change over time, too.

You might not want a cloud IDE, but based on the many projects and companies in this space, and the many millions of dollars being spent on it, I’m quite sure I am not alone in wanting to be able to code in the cloud.

Years ago, it was equally implausible to do your word-processing and spreadsheets in the cloud. Now it’s routine.

Re: GitLab Web IDE

#232

Post by bitL »

sytse wrote: post #172
bitL wrote: post #59

GitLab is slowly on its way to compete with Microsoft, Google, JetBrains... I hope you guys create your own programming language as well to become a real software company ;-) Good luck!

Thanks! One of our sub-values is boring solutions https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#efficiency So I don't think we'll be creating a programming language soon. I'm following crystal https://crystal-lang.org/ with interest. And one of our team members is making one in a private capacity https://gitlab.com/yorickpeterse/inko

Cool! You never know - AFAIK Kotlin first started as an individual project as well. I'll keep an eye on you ;-)

Re: GitLab Web IDE

#233

Post by bartread »

inimino wrote: post #183
bartread wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard this a lot since around 2012/13 when I first became aware of C9, and even gave it a go. Granted it was and is impressive as a technical achievement, but I really don't see the use case at all, other than as something to use as a quick fix embedded by a repo host. My laptop is a tool I use every single day and have with me almost all of the time. I do not need internet connectivity to remain productive, whi…

There's no reason an online hosted Web IDE can't work perfectly well in an offline mode too. Offline-capable Web apps are essentially a solved problem.

> Offline-capable Web apps are essentially a solved problem.

That may be true in theory. In practice "essentially" is an awfully long way from "absolutely", with offline support in many apps being either choppy or non-existent. Even the venerable Google Docs is something of a ####show when used offline, to the point where I gave up and went back to Office 365.

Re: GitLab Web IDE

#234

Post by rectang »

amenod wrote: post #212
cornholio wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a justifiable reaction, similar to the one after Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub. When an 800 pounds gorilla pays a bunch of cash to acquire a successful independent product, they do so either to quench a potential rival or to embrace and extend into that field and leverage their traditional offering. It makes sense from a business perspective, and they are the only ones capable of paying that much cas…

Genuinly curious: is there a (relatively cheap) cloud vendor that doesn't do that? MS & G seem pretty similar to me...

The interests of platform vendors and developers are not aligned.

Developers want their skills to be portable, in order to maximize the market for their labor. Platform vendors want you to stick with their offerings in order to maximize the value of the platform.

Even so, vendors can choose how high to dial up the pain they inflict on developers who dare to wander. Trying to develop websites that worked across multiple browsers a decade ago was incredibly painful because of Microsoft dragging its feet on standards compliance for IE. It was so bad that many developers from that era will bear a grudge towards Microsoft for the rest of their lives.

I always laugh bitterly when I hear from a vendor about how much they care about developers. If you really cared about developers you wouldn't make our lives so damn difficult. A huge chunk of my life has been lost to switching costs.

Probably the best remedy is to use developer-governed FOSS platforms whenever possible. The perverse incentives towards lockin don't go away entirely, but they are much less.

Re: GitLab Web IDE

#235

Post by amenod »

zachlatta wrote: post #18

Wow, very cool. Lots of new players in this space: https://repl.it , https://glitch.me , and now GitLab (and I'd be surprised if GitHub doesn't follow in tow). Cloud9's acquisition really left a big hole in the market. AFAIK there's still nothing out there that gives you a decent code editor (edit multiple files, have multiple tabs open, etc) that also gives you access to a Linux shell and ability to expose ports lik…

Cool, but I would appreciate it more if they fixed some relatively small (probably) and very annoying UX bugs:

  - why can't we schedule manual jobs to be started when dependencies are finished?
  - on merge request, Discussions tab, the way one chooses between a comment and discussion is simply awful (talking about a button with a dropdown) - I have yet to meet a developer who immediately understood the difference between the two and could use them as intended
  - why can't I limit some type of jobs to the branch AND a tag? (for instance deploy_production should only happen on master and with a version tag)
  - ...
It looks like they are neglecting development in the core of the product, which is just sad.

Re: GitLab Web IDE

#236

Post by majkinetor »

cup-of-tea wrote: post #220
jakecodes wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey there. I'm the developer who made the POC. My original idea came after watching non-technical people try to make changes to the readme. They would have to ask for a lot of help to get the terminal open or use a GUI. When really all they wanted to do was make a quick change. The idea is that there's a lot of different users using git and I want to make it accessible for everyone.

Why do you want non-technical people to be able to edit the readme? That's for programmers to communicate to programmers. A little knowledge is dangerous. Keep non-technicals away from git.

My businesses function regularly edits md files.

Re: GitLab Web IDE

#237

Post by amelius »

It seems that one group of developers wants to decentralize everything, while another group wants to centralize everything.

... Why?

Re: GitLab Web IDE

#238

Post by ckocagil »

amelius wrote: post #237

It seems that one group of developers wants to decentralize everything, while another group wants to centralize everything. ... Why?

Decentralize for privacy and anti-censorship, centralize for convenience (collaboration, sharing, zero management, continue working where you left off on another device, ...)

Re: GitLab Web IDE

#239

Post by golergka »

snurk wrote: post #187

I wish GitLab would take whatever resources this has and put them all on site reliability. They have a ton of open positions listed, but none are for Site Reliability Engineer. Frequent slow requests and 5xx errors keep me from giving GitLab a real try.

And performance. I migrated our project from Gitlab to Githab exactly because of how excruciatingly slow PR workflow was (serialized game assets routinely have changesets in tens of thousands of lines).

Re: GitLab Web IDE

#240

Post by Gys »

zachlatta wrote: post #18

Wow, very cool. Lots of new players in this space: https://repl.it , https://glitch.me , and now GitLab (and I'd be surprised if GitHub doesn't follow in tow). Cloud9's acquisition really left a big hole in the market. AFAIK there's still nothing out there that gives you a decent code editor (edit multiple files, have multiple tabs open, etc) that also gives you access to a Linux shell and ability to expose ports lik…

Specifically for Golang there is https://github.com/b3log/wide Which I think is a very impressive piece of work.

OT: Its Chinese. It makes me wonder what other tools and technologies exist there and of which 'Western' developers never even have heard of.

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