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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

#461

Post by nixgeek »

greyhair wrote: post #388
anthony_r wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, like Microsoft paid the billions to give it out now for free. Besides, do you want your index funds to do well? Because that's exactly where the proceeds go to.

More than that, github was floundering economically, and Microsoft bought them to ensure continuity, because Microsoft was the single largest user. Don't want to rely on Microsoft for GitHub? The underlying 'git' is open source. Just deal with your git repos raw. No one is forcing you to use github.

You don’t pay $7.5B for things which are “floundering economically” usually. It was a strategic buy, and likely reflects a healthy multiple on revenue. Kudos to Microsoft for being the one to get the deal done, I’m very confident GitHub had multiple suitors.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#462

Post by munk-a »

blacktriangle wrote: post #455
maccard wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are we seeing the extend or extinguish with GitHub? It's been 3.5 years and GitHub is just as compatible with git as it has ever been.

That's the trick, the git is open, but the metadata is what matters. Issues, PRs, integrations into various code auditing services. That's the whole "extend" bit.

That is somewhat fair - there aren't great alternatives to migrate issues and the like to today. But all of those bits of metadata are easy to pull out of the service via API hooks. If someone wanted to start a serious competitor to github that shares the same basic data model it'd be pretty trivial to write up migration aides.

I don't disbelieve that it's possible for microsoft to severely restrict these - but entirely removing them is off the table unless they cut out a lot of value. Inter-service communication to third party review tools and CI/CD tools all depend strongly on those API hooks.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#463

Post by vbezhenar »

selykg wrote: post #229
swiley wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I did not understand that part. Every heavy Emacs or vim user have its own customizations of editor. How does it work with shared image?

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#464

Post by lilyball »

sammorrowdrums wrote: post #306
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’ve very recently become a GitHub engineer, and I got pre-access to the beta too and I must say - my absolute favourite thing about CoseSpaces is being able to dev on a repo you don’t work on regularly and probably wouldn’t contribute if it meant having to set up environment etc. It’s really nice to just dip into a project with a working environment in seconds, make your PR and then move on.

This is a problem that can be solved without Codespaces too. For example, if GitHub were to embrace Nix, every project could have a shell.nix file for all of their dependencies, and the new engineer bootstrap script that installs Nix could then just add an internal Nix binary cache (or use Cachix). Any time the shell.nix changes a GitHub Action could push the closure to the binary cache.

With this setup, you can use whatever local tool you want and, as long as environment variables are respected, they’ll just work. The only requirement on your end is to either run nix-shell first, or to use direnv and ask it to load the nix env for you.

The downside is you still are compiling locally, so you still need sufficient CPU/memory resources, but that’s it.

Unfortunately most companies still aren’t paying any attention to Nix.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#465

Post by munk-a »

austincheney wrote: post #456
blacktriangle wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github does not need to be open source. Open source needs to pull its head out of its collective ass and not hand over its entire workflow to private companies. Github may be the single greatest execution of embrace/extend/extinguish in computing history.

Technically speaking, Microsoft is a public company. A private company implies not open to investment on a public market.

You are technically correct - but it's overly pedantic. Another commonly accepted definition of public companies outside of the US is companies that are partially or wholly owned by the government and thus act as a public service. This includes crown corporations in Canada or the USPS in the US. I think within the context they used that calling Microsoft a private company is fair since they have no obligation to "act in the public good".

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#466

Post by vbezhenar »

patrickserrano wrote: post #225
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.

Hire wizard consultant to fix magic and let the rest to rely on magic.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#467

Post by 908B64B197 »

bogwog wrote: post #358

Serious question: if I were to use this, would Microsoft collect analytics on me (code written, keystrokes, mouse movements, sleep/work schedule, productivity metrics, etc) and monetize that data by using it to build some AI product like Copilot, or build a productivity dashboard so managers can fire people for not being productive enough (like Xsolla did), use it to serve me ads, or do some stupid/irresponsible/unet…

> code written, keystrokes, mouse movements, sleep/work schedule, productivity metrics, etc

That's not the most valuable info at all.

What would be valuable is to know which ecosystem, languages and tech people are investing time and resources into. These are the ones you need to prioritize for your dev tools. For instance, Microsoft decided to invest in supporting Rust https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-environment/rus... as well as making sure .NET works on all OS.

> or build a productivity dashboard so managers can fire people for not being productive enough (like Xsolla did)

When a competitor decides to start using these, it's awesome. You get a nice window of opportunity to poach high performers.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#468

Post by vbezhenar »

remexre wrote: post #325
brundolf wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the panic. This isn't a black-box system, it's git hub. Owning your artifacts is as simple as setting up a job to automatically clone the repo a couple times a day (assuming your entire company is working through the cloud interface and not a single person already has a local checkout). Lots of companies put their entire databases in AWS - owned by a company that's already evil, no speculation requ…

> This isn't a black-box system, it's github. Owning your artifacts is as simple as setting up a job to automatically clone the repo a couple times a day (assuming your entire company is working through the cloud interface and not a single person already has a local checkout). Isn't the use-case they're selling in the article approximately "the development environment setup is so fragile that it doesn't work on lots…

I might be wrong, but it seems to be a combination of visual studio code + container plugin + docker. So you would need to install visual studio code, few plugins and spin up a docker to replicate that environment on the local machine.

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#469

Post by stnmtn »

lilyball wrote: post #464
sammorrowdrums wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve very recently become a GitHub engineer, and I got pre-access to the beta too and I must say - my absolute favourite thing about CoseSpaces is being able to dev on a repo you don’t work on regularly and probably wouldn’t contribute if it meant having to set up environment etc. It’s really nice to just dip into a project with a working environment in seconds, make your PR and then move on.

This is a problem that can be solved without Codespaces too. For example, if GitHub were to embrace Nix, every project could have a shell.nix file for all of their dependencies, and the new engineer bootstrap script that installs Nix could then just add an internal Nix binary cache (or use Cachix). Any time the shell.nix changes a GitHub Action could push the closure to the binary cache. With this setup, you can use…

-insert comment about that hacker news comment about how dropbox could be replicated with linux here-

Re: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

#470

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

bogwog wrote: post #358

Serious question: if I were to use this, would Microsoft collect analytics on me (code written, keystrokes, mouse movements, sleep/work schedule, productivity metrics, etc) and monetize that data by using it to build some AI product like Copilot, or build a productivity dashboard so managers can fire people for not being productive enough (like Xsolla did), use it to serve me ads, or do some stupid/irresponsible/unet…

As slownew45 points out, Github does not make money from individuals who use it for free. Of course such use will become increasingly difficult over time for Microsoft pinheads to justify from a business perspective. Telemetry, full-on surveillance and ultimately subtle manipulation of individual software authors seems an obvious choice to try to justify why Github should continue to allow non-paying individuals to use their repository.

The Facebook web browser. Never say never. If we knew what we know today about privacy, we would have pointed out the idiocy of anyone choosing to use a web browser released by Google.

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