Coder (Visual Studio Code in browser) goes open source
coder.com
coder.com
There was a lot of good thing about that setup. Nobody could walk home with code, and no code was lost on somebody laptop.
Execution happened on a server, much more powerful than any dev machine.
The problem wouldn’t actually be people taking code home, it would be taking the data they are working on, as this could be highly sensitive data (think medical history) and regulation wouldn’t allow for it to leave the company location.
Doesn't full disk encryption solve that as well as putting it in the cloud (and you'd need encryption anyway)
The real scenario would be “we need to finish this blocker that Jim is working on, but he is sick and hasn’t pushed progress to git.”
As to syncing with cloud. Why not just have it on cloud and let people ssh into the server. And then do one better better, and give them a full IDE instead of teaching them emacs or vim.
First thing off the bat I notice is that Coder looks harder to deploy or try out, Theia was super easy, on the landing page they had a docker one liner:
docker run -it -p 3000:3000 -v "$(pwd):/home/project:cached" theiaide/theia:next
This means I have the full power of the underlying server, access to my docker on the host and any other features.
This also means though that it is direct shell access over the web and should be locked down like Fort Knox.
I've put this behind Traefik with httpauth for testing and it works well so far.
> 1) Download a binary (Linux and OSX supported. Windows coming soon)
> 2) Start the binary with the project directory as the first argument
> code-server <inital directory to open>
From: https://github.com/codercom/code-server
Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried it.