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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

#231

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 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?

You're totally right. Javascript and its ilk are clearly superior to the languages and tooling of the past. There's no doubt about that.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anyo…

Do you consider AWS Lambda and such to be BaaS? I'm pretty new to the field and have been focusing on AWS 'serverless' as the backend for most projects. Would you say this is bad practice overall?

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#233
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub isn't forcing anybody to use a web IDE. The most broadly used access interface is VSCode. Then there are heretics like me who choose to ssh in so we can use Vim. This is described in the article.

How is the latency btw? I SSH to a beefy box that sits under my table and sometimes I hate the latency of running emacsclient over X. But I am not using VIM and I don't use terminal emacs because of clipboard integration betweeen remote emacs and local desktop. I know there are hacks to make clipboard sync between local and remote emacs sessions without running emacs over X11 forwarding, but I always found those to b…

It's very good. The rendering and inputs are done locally. Completion, compilation, linting, and other things are done remotely but they are not instant anyway so the network latency is not really noticeable.

I use Github Codespaces with a Vscode and vscode-neovim. Neovim is running locally.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#234
post #95

Has anyone built a product that can beat Rubymine's code navigation capabilities? I can navigate to any internal or dependency definition, out of the box.

I find RubyMine to be sluggish, and I stick with SublimeText and a set of terminals. However, I was trying to debug a plugin of a plugin of a gem, and installed it again to see if it would help. I found the problem in about 5 minutes because of this navigation. Credit where due; it was pretty awesome.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#236

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…

Sometimes I amuse myself by thinking that fantasy games are actually a thinly disguised sci-fi commentary on the direction of modern programming. Take for example the Protoss race in Starcraft or the Sheika tribe in Breath of the Wild - the premise is basically that there's a highly advanced society using the remnants of amazing ancient technology that they themselves no longer understand.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing about jamstack that requires you to use third-parties (except the CDN part, I guess, but that's just a mirror). You could just as easily host your own CMS and database and call out to it the same way. It's just that like auth, logging, etc, CDNs have been neatly abstracted out and service-ified in such a way that it's often more economical to go third-party. But that choice is orthogonal to jamstack.

I agree on that, and was going to add that, to be fair to the stack. But the reality is, while that's doable, most people just use third-party services, at least that's my experience.

Sure, but I think that's true in non-Jamstack code as well. Datadog, Snowflake, BigQuery, DynamoDB, Google Analytics, etc. are all examples that I've seen used by non-Jamstack software, and most have a fair bit of lock-in.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#239

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…

This may not be what you are referring too BUT I can say as a .Net developer it's amazing how little .Net devs know about how the low level dev related stuff works because visual studio holds there hand. I have blown people's minds by showing them how to just call msbuild or git from the command line etc... I think it's changing since dotnet core took over in that space but had a good 10 year run where generally no o…

There’s two sides to that coin. In visual studio, most of the time you don’t need to bother to see what’s under the hood, and you can focus on feature development. In that way, their ignorance can be a good sign. The flip side is when your stuff won’t build, it can be an ordeal to figure out why, but thankfully it does not happen a lot, and they can leave it to the local experts.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#240
post #14

Maybe they should have used Nix to get a dev environment that is identical for everyone... but that would be too easy. The future is long term probably in the web, I'm just not sure we are there yet.

There are lots of options for making your dev environments reasonably quick & easy to set up if you're mostly doing web stuff, or developing for a very small count of platforms, and mostly or entirely with open-source tools. Change any of that and things start to get harder in a hurry.
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