A History of IDEs at Google
laurent.le-brun.eu
A History of IDEs at Google
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Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#2The thing I most love about Cider-V is that moving between it and (often remote) VSCode when working outside google3 becomes mostly painless.
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#3That most engineers use the same IDE at Google allows the company to collect a huge amount of telemetry about what features they are using, how often, and how much. Quite similar to the entire codebase being in a single repo, it allows a certain visibility into what is happening that just isn't possible other places.
When Google wanted engineers to use AI features, it turned them on in Cider-V by default. And if you turned them off, later updates would turn them back on. This is very good for your adoption metrics, but might not tell you exactly what you want to know about engineer happiness.
Such a dominant IDE also allows management to ignore the long-tail of users who aren't using it.
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#4I was surprised to read that Chromebook use at Google was common for engineers. Even if developing remotely I had assumed they'd opt for the most powerful machine possible.
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#5"the advantages of having a single, extensible platform become even more obvious"
-- imagine the impact that could be unlocked if we got the Android and Chromium workflows into CiderV/Critique!
The article is framed around "all Googlers" but there is still a very large contingent of Googlers who cannot use these tools.
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#6I was surprised to read that Chromebook use at Google was common for engineers. Even if developing remotely I had assumed they'd opt for the most powerful machine possible.
Very little development in Google3 happens locally. You aren't even allowed to keep the source code on your local disk, and this is true no matter what OS it runs. (Android and Chromium are different though.)
You have access to an extremely powerful remote workstation that from a UI perspective functions almost identically to a local workstation, via Chrome Remote Desktop. Plus, no one builds things locally, even on that machine. There is a huge, absolutely amazing distributed build system that everyone uses for everything. (Again, Android and Chromium are different.)
So you don't really need a powerful local machine. I held out for a long time--there were a lot of growing pains in the early days. But eventually it got really, really good.
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#7I was surprised to read that Chromebook use at Google was common for engineers. Even if developing remotely I had assumed they'd opt for the most powerful machine possible.
I do most of my development on a MacBook air and a Chromebook. The ~only thing I do from my local machine is ssh into a beefy workstation and use chrome.
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#8I was surprised to read that Chromebook use at Google was common for engineers. Even if developing remotely I had assumed they'd opt for the most powerful machine possible.
Since it's mostly browser tabs, as long as you have ample memory (eg 16gb) it's good enough.
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#9I was surprised to read that Chromebook use at Google was common for engineers. Even if developing remotely I had assumed they'd opt for the most powerful machine possible.
From what I'd heard contractors get issued as little as a Pixel tab and dock? Everything else is in the cloud (either gLinux desktops or cloud shells) AFAIK.
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#10I was surprised to read that Chromebook use at Google was common for engineers. Even if developing remotely I had assumed they'd opt for the most powerful machine possible.
How common? I'd wager most people still use a mac, followed second, but far by regular goobuntu laptops. Chromebooks goes 3rd because Windows is practically banned.