GitHub Codespaces
github.com
github.com
EDIT: They actually announced the renaming of the product a couple of days ago: https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/30/microsofts-visual-studio-o...
One of the most impressive parts about Microsoft's recent acquisitions is how quickly essentially two separate companies are now sharing code. It's hard enough to get different teams/products in the same company to use shared code in a meaningful way, and Microsoft has accomplished it with a new company.
Something I don’t yet understand about GitHub Codespaces is: can you execute a Dockerfile from it? Can you execute multiple ones? Can you execute docker-compose configurations?
Is it just an editor, or can it also spin an AWS (or Azure?) instance of the code you are writing?
I have seen people mention they can code from an iPad; but that’s not a complete workstation replacement unless it is easy to run your code.
Super super super excited!
I imagine the way Code spaces works is you spin up a container in azure with checked out GitHub branch, vscode on the browser then interfaces with the container(s).
Pretty neat idea if you can customize the docker container setup like a simple docker compose file or something.
- An early announcement on their focus: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2019/05/02/remote-develo...
- Most (all?) of their recent VSCode updates include improvements to remote development. i.e.: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_44#_remote-developm...
- Facebook partnering and becoming an early, heavy adopter: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2019/11/19/faceboo...
It was a lifesaver too. I was using a severely under-powered ThinkPad and I'm admittedly awful with Windows. Being able to quickly swap to that remote setup reduced a tremendous amount of friction for me.
When good software works, it's so cool.
Generally extremely good, but for obvious reasons this makes me think twice about connecting to some things.
I've been doing some AOSP customization (Android 9) and I have several remote (Ubuntu) servers hosting/building OS images for different implementations (it takes too much disk space for a local PC and even so, I have a Windows based PC because of reasons, so if I had to use VMs, it would be too slow).
Now I can use intellisense through the entire Linux folder without delays. And... a global search for a string takes no more than 2 seconds. And I am talking about a string search through the entire codebase (not just the kernel; thousands of files).
My days are brighter, my life happier, my mood changed; thank you whoever invented this!
It's not entirely self-hosted, but it's an interesting hybrid middle-ground.
That was a year I'll never get back, but I do highly recommend the fun of leaving _vti_bin/ directories laying around with funny-behaving things in them. Every few months I still see evidence in my personal site logs of a script kiddie slowly becoming enraged as they figure out I left them a busy box to play with.
Bet you a dollar the GitHub mobile app that's going to come out pretty soon will also be totally proprietary with no source provided. It's a growing trend in developer tooling: even Docker's desktop versions (not Microsoft's fault, but still) are not even open source (much less free software).
It's going to be really sad in a few years when Microsoft starts turning the screws to extract more revenue from this free software ecosystem (GitHub/npm) that they are coming to exert major control over.
Soon, the most common "industry standard" tooling for the largest and most popular software development ecosystem (javascript) will rely heavily on proprietary software that spies on you continuously while you use it, just like Windows.
Just in the last few days, I've come across a few very minor bugs, with a one-line fix. In order to make that change, I currently need to fork the repo, download it, make the change (turn off my prettier or adapt to the repo's) then make the PR.
I'm hoping with this I can just make a PR in the owner's package. It's the difference between a 10 minute commit and a 1 minute change.
This is not to disparage you, just to note that it may not have such a great effect.
Personally speaking, I'd be worried that I end up making 15 commits to get everything right and the history in that PR would be slightly embarrassing. Having the live linting, intellisense and tests makes pushing a single commit a lot easier.
I'm envisioning a project with a full automated build and test suite with an on-demand staging environment for each change (the k8s docs project does this, at least it did the last time I chucked a typo PR over the wall).
With proper integration to the editor you could have an extremely slick dev environment instantly available for any casual passerby. Once implemented, this would greatly simplify maintainers' lives as well!
But I feel like things are set up explicitly to not work this way. Maybe I'm doing something wrong but can you trigger a rebuild of a prerelease?
It seems you need to setup a new tag and a new release version to ever get a rebuild. There are explicitly no official Actions for updating releases. A new release for a one line change seems a bit crazy (and you'll get a huge clutter of releases which is confusing for users)
I tried to ask and was told it's maybe possible if you write an action yourself .. yikes https://github.community/t5/GitHub-Actions/What-s-the-canoni...
I recently wanted to submit a 3 character change to golang that significantly speeds up strconv.ParseFloat(), but lost interest about 2-3 minutes into reading this: https://golang.org/doc/contribute.html
Codespaces -> https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/web_ide/
Insights -> https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/insights/
GH Actions -> https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/
etc
a) Gitlab.com is ridiculously slow. Even the CEO admits they failed to invest in it.
b) You can't disable features you don't need so you end up with a sidebar full of Kubernetes and Security features for a Git project dedicated to documentation.
c) Staggering amount of open issues and merge requests so you feel discouraged from even raising anything since it just gets lost in the weeds.
d) On the main Git project screen there are 15 buttons. Including again ones for "Add Kubernetes cluster" or "Add License" which you can't remove or hide even though it's irrelevant for 99% of Git projects.
e) Feature set and billing are all over the place. It has great project/issue management but in order to get say roadmaps you need to have everyone in your team on the $99/month plan. Even though they aren't developers. So in some cases Gitlab ends up being much more expensive than Jira + Github.
I could keep going. But Gitlab is an example of a company that is moving too fast and needs much better product management. I would take Github's more deliberate approach any day.
Look at Android vs iOS. Each release sees popular features "borrowed" from the competition. Back and forth Google takes something Apple did well, then Apple turns around and does the same.
Tight competition between two platforms gives us, the consumers/users, the best. It drives innovation, it drives down prices (I mean, lets be honest, GitLab had the entire "free" thing down a LONG time ago), and the features that we do have get refined to be even better.
With this feature, MS just ventured in a space where no-one can compare yet.
If this ever gets popular, that's check mate right here.
* No more source code on developers machine so better for security.
* No more development environment to setup and all the devs sharing the exact same settings: simplified onboarding of devs.
* No need for costly developers machines.
* No more infra to setup to host the source code repository, the CI/CD workflows (even if many companies already moved that to the cloud).
But as a developer I am worried what could also come next:
* dashboards for managers with all sort of stats on developers: code quality with arbitrary rules, productivity (number of lines of codes), number of stars from other developers, etc.
* being locked-in with the Microsoft toolchain all along from source code edition to deployment in Azure. For instance currently I chose to do my NodeJs backend development on vim with coc-vim and found it to be much lighter than Vscode (I have a very old developers machine)
Funny enough, after introducing the analytics stuff, they started the next section by showing that the more code you write the more security vulnerabilities you have.
Which is it, Github? Do I want to stay on top of your SLOC leaderboards so my manager doesn't fire me? Or does writing the most lines mean I introduced the most vulnerabilities so my manager should fire me? The answer depends on which product github is trying to sell you at that very moment.
How does GitHub Codespaces allow for any of this? All of this was already possible with plain git, no?
I've been doing that in my company and it's awesome to have a reproducible environment for each project.
...down to number of keystrokes. Microsoft has a 25+ years history of spying on users.
> being locked-in with the Microsoft toolchain all along from source code edition to deployment in Azure
That's the real endgame. Lock-in has been Microsoft go-to strategy since the beginning.
If they're able to do setup for Python, Go, Ruby, and JavaScript projects, I suspect that'll be > 50% of all professional work (both FOSS and private) done on GH.
The debugging and refactoring experiences for Go and Python in VSCode feel slow, awkward to set up and configure and just generally tacked-on.
I have gotten the PyCharm professional and GoLand licensed through my employer but I will 100% be paying for them out of my own pocket if I ever lose that.
I use vscode for lightweight file editing. But for any long term project, it doesn't offer anything over Jetbrains products.
Programmers create enormous value. If you can get even small single digit percentage improvements by leveraging better tooling, it pays for itself almost right away.
I estimate conservatively I produce $500,000 in value a year. If I can eke out a 1% improvement in productivity that's worth $5000 a year.
I think it's a big blind spot that developers don't invest enough in.
With the Go language server kicking off, Go development in VS Code is literally a breeze. Every single thing I'd want to do (format code, imports, run tests, run a particular test, debug a test, breakpoints, on and on) has been integrated into the VS Code plugin and it works pretty much seamlessly. I haven't used Goland since it's early release in 2016 or so, so I might be missing out on something, but it doesn't feel like it.
I've never had a good experience with PyCharm. Again might be because I've using earlier releases and things have gotten better. But I'm at a point where I'm too comfortable with VS Code and have customized it to a point where I don't think it's worth it for me to switch to another editor, especially one that is tied to a particular language.
Them's fightin' words. But on a more serious note, I think 50% is a massive overestimation. We haven't seen pricing. Unless MS is willing to take a huge loss on this there's no way it will be free. We all know the resources required to run a modern web app in development mode. I can certainly see this being useful if you happen to be away from your dev machine, or if you just want to contribute to something without setting up the whole environment, but not as a full-time solution. Especially considering github is known to have outages. You'll really be SOL then.
* You host your project in github
* You fund your project using github sponsors
* You develop your project using github codespaces
* You compile, test and deploy using github actions
* You cloud host on azure
Each individual feature is definitely great. I'm not trying to be critical of Microsoft trying to turn their investment in github into a profitable business. This is a kind of vertical integration that is guaranteed to lead to some efficiencies.
One prediction based on this stack is the next piece could be some sort of subscription payment architecture. I wouldn't be surprised to see some kind of Microsoft Marketplace integration coming, but maybe branded under github. Some kind of SaaS subscription enabler.
GitHub isn't driving anyone to Azure Devops, we'd prefer folks to migrate from AzDO to GitHub. The focus of much of our work is building out the GitHub platform to meet and fairly quickly exceed the capabilities of AzDO (or any other platform for that matter) in every respect
If you are doing anything on the Web, you are competing against Google ( and Facebook ). If you are doing Retail, e-commerce, you are competing against Amazon.
Microsoft is trying to turn the Cloud into its new OS before Amazon does it. But from the way things stand this will likely never happen.
So as far as I can tell I have no problem with that strategy at all.
I have actually been running code-server [0] which finally allows me to have my powerful editor with all my settings and extensions and working with my own files on any device.
I don't know if people realize just how much market share VS Code has grabbed. It went from 7% to 50% in five years, according some some surveys [1]. Microsoft is quietly dominating this part of the stack. [2]
[1]: https://www.welcometothejungle.com/en/articles/vs-code-javas...
[2]: This is not an invitation to debate the merits of VS Code or tell me which editor you use, just an observation of growth
Isn't it obvious? VS Code.
Regarding Atom, I've heard some whispers around the internet that they may slowly wind it down in favor of VSCode so that Microsoft doesn't have two competing text editors. Anyone know how true that might be?
I think there’s a clear benefit to Microsoft for GitHub to internally use Azure, but I think there’s a clear benefit to Microsoft’s developer community, GitHub and the Microsoft Partner ecosystem for GitHub to support AWS and GCP via open source, AWS Marketplace, Docker and anything else that helps ensure GitHub is useful independent of the rest of Microsoft’s services — GitHub being impartial is more important to Microsoft than the extra market share they might — might — get.
I could also see this being popular with engineering teams. No futzing with the new hire's computer, just have them open a web browser and they can dive right in!
Personally I have no problem with Github, as its advantage far outweigh its disadvantage.
But I'm still wary of Microsoft, and remember them from the 90's. Completely dominant and ruthless. Even though it's new people now.
I can see them embracing open source development workflow, branching to eat up everything that has to do with your development workflow. Once Microsoft wins the ecosystem of open source developer workflow is when they'll start to leverage it, using it as lead gen for the lucrative cloud/dev ops services.
They're playing a long game to beat Amazon AWS, and to beat off any new startups with shorter repls.
It would be awesome if this could be setup as a backend for vim as well. Given how well Coc.vim integrates with VSCode tooling, I'm cautiously optimistic.
If this is the same or similar approach, then it should work just fine.
If the pricing for Codespaces is reasonable, I'm going to move to that for sure. It's been kind of a hassle to keep my self-hosted setup running properly.
https://twitter.com/notdetails/status/1258070699165585410
... also this tweet from another GitHub product designer
You know, it's not that we do not have enough megacorps controlling every aspect of our lives. We need more of the "opposite" - places that empower you and leave you in peace and control.
> That’s definitely something I wanna do; that’s not really in progress yet. I did a bunch of research in that area, so that I can’t really put a timeline on. I can definitely say that more async style traditional GitHub collaboration will be happening this year. I think there will be a natural outgrowth from that into the real-time stuff.
Don't know if Sobo or his Atom colleagues do anything with the VS Code people, but hearing about Codespaces made me immediately think about his ideas for cloud editing.
(AFAIK the CodeSpaces presentation didn't mention collaborative editing in its current feature set)
Thinking about it? I thought this was a feature since 2018...
I hope we are not witnessing a big sherlocking being done here, but… it really looks like one. :/
Microsoft/GitHub joining the dev-environment-as-code movement is huge, will likely save us all a few more years of dependency-hell.
(EDIT: Removed official blog post link because taywrobel posted it first)
It's quite crazy what GitHub is doing...
Microsoft hasn't been kind to them!
They killed Atom the day they took over - they haven't had the balls to say anything publicly, but just go look at the commit graphs in the Atom repos. Here's a summary: https://twitter.com/DuncanLock/status/1177747512905461760
That's...scummy.
I was new to dev world and had never touched AWS so the transition to AWS C9 left me bewildered and I just gave up on it.
This seems like this would fill that role for me pretty well.
Bonus points - I currently use Visual Studio Code as my goto tool.
Now I know Microsoft has a long history of safeguarding trade secrets, they were always very aggressive in this regard, from the beginning, the Xerox Parc days, and they still are. They state in their Investor Report that in Research & Development, they safeguard trade secrets, and are a world leader in patent pursuit [1].
Surely I don't need to worry that this platform for online development, tied to my source code, is not just another step towards making it easier for them to have a sneak peak into what I'm building? I know they can see my code in Github, but as a developer I know source code is one thing, but getting code to compile and run is a lot more work (on a very big project). This would make it even easier to dip into project runtimes, since IDE and environment settings are stored online now.
I mean, there's no way that strategically, they would aggressively try to bulwark their own business lines, by snooping on competing tech, and using insights to help strategically direct their patent lawyers, advising them on who to go after an how. And anyway, even if they did do that occasionally, there's no way they would bully me unjustly, I would surely deserve it. Right?
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar13/financial-re...
There's a lot of reasons why Microsoft will want that, among them that if they can sell a solution that works in cheap terminals, they can tie corporate customers into their bubble by selling them services that allows them to avoid buying hardware for their employees.
I'm not saying that being wary of Microsoft's ownership of your code isn't warranted, I'm just saying there are probably less shady/convoluted reasons why this kind of product benefits them - Occam's razor, etc.
I wish they’d up their game then. The cloud versions of Word and Excel are missing numerous important features.
* a file tree (do-able via the octotree browser plugin)
* clickable functions (Github is doing this on some projects in some languages I've noticed)
* caller tree. Xcode is one of the only navigator doing this, you can see the whole hierarchy of callers and go through them easily.
What we're getting is something really cool, but it does not bring the caller tree function. It looks like this:
https://holko.pl/public/images/xcode-search/call-hierarchy.p...
At least now we don't need to run VS Code in another Chromium instance!
Now that Microsoft has Chromium Edge in Windows, it should be possible to provide a good way to spawn and communicate with Chromium GUIs/windows from native Win32 apps! That would be killer!
I wonder if they'll support plugins and importing other VS Code settings to the online editor.
This is a minor variation of the existing Visual Studio Online (now renamed Visual Studio Codespace) product.
The core of it is running an automatically created azure hosted docker container. It automatically checks out your repository. It actually runs the whole VS Code backend on the remote machine, with the the user interface being provided by the "local" VS Code instance (web or desktop).
I'm going to bet this will end up with identical pricing to the existing product, at least if you don't pay for any github products. If you do, there might be some discount or included running time with those products.
The only part that sounds new here is the editor integration into the GitHub site.
Cloud9 could be great but hasn't gotten any traction apart from using it for some tutorials.
This Codespaces brings the best of both world and kill two birds with one stone.
The next step is Azure, hopefully they could have an Amazon Lightsail equivalent that is simple to understand and deploy without scaring beginners away.
I think Chromebooks are going to be a great use for this. Lightweight client but full editor and environment, with no hassle.
A great use for this if you don't mind losing the ability to run Ublock Origin and similar extensions when Google "upgrades" the software on the Chromebook to extension manifest V3.
That is relevant because most developers probably need to look stuff up on the web while they are working. Some of us really don't like ads.
I work at Microsoft on Azure but not with VS Codespaces or with GitHub Codespaces — I’m just a big fan/user/beta tester.
[1]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/bring-your-own-m...
gitpod.io is tightly integrated with the Monaco editor; is it not?
I ask because the top of https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/ says, "The Monaco editor is not supported in mobile browsers or mobile web frameworks". Has Microsoft changed their policy and simply neglected to change the passage I just quoted?
However, we do extensive testing of Gitpod and Theia on mobile devices, and work around bugs or contribute fixes upstream to Monaco when possible.
Gitpod/Theia users now report that the iPad experience is great, and we continue to push forward on improving it.
On the other hand, VS Codespaces blocks you with a "This browser is not supported" error page when you're not using Chrome. (Even pre-Chromium Edge is unsupported.) But you absolutely need Safari support to work on iPad (all browsers there are basically just Safari skins).
Give it a decade and you'll have Microsoft specific developers and organizations who are locked in beyond rescue.
It's always a fragmentation vs defragmentation battle.
1. Create a popular, locally run dev editor.
2. Shift it to the cloud.
3. Build all new features into the cloud version only.
4. Ignore the locally run version until it's obsolete.
5. Developers rent the cloud version forever.
The GitHub integration is going to be amazing for Microsoft because the allure of clicking a button and getting an instant development environment will be huge. Watch for a big campaign where popular frameworks start providing "Launch in Codespaces" or similar buttons.
We'll get to a point where new developers won't even know how to set up a local development environment. I'd bet a lot that Microsoft is envisioning a world where developers pay $1000+ per year for a combination of GitHub, Codespaces, Actions, Pipelines, etc..
The idea of paying cloud compute rates for things like build agents is crazy to me, but here we are.
In the end, it will come down to latency, usability and pricing. I do agree with you though - I'm not paying $2K+ for a macbook pro and then pay to run VSCode in the cloud -- something doesn't add up.
I think we're already there. I think system administration is the current biggest stumbling block that new programmers have. Tools like repl.it, google colab, etc. remove these (stumbling blocks | learning opportunities).
At many universities, a lot of code is now written in online editors that compile, run, and check against public and hidden unit tests (sort of like codewars but lower quality).
I personally love learning systems administration but there is very real demand for services that abstract it all away.
That said, you enumerated an effective roadmap for this kind of transition. I suspect it will generate an increased annual cost similar in magnitude to the Office 365 migration.
Don’t need to give it a decade, you can find plenty now, or two decades ago. It’s not like Microsoft is a new entrant to the IDE market with VSCode or GiHub Codespaces (hint: the VS part of VSCode).
Still a great IDE though.
How so? Node/Electron != browser, though I see how the whole HTML/JS/CSS thing can be confusing.
More generally, is there going to be a clean way to to use this if we already have a containerized stack, especially editing code in a user's existing container? (With the code still under version control, of course)
Gitpod also has user-specific Preferences, and even user-specific VS Code extensions. (Usually customization places have a "Workspace" tab and a "User" tab.)
The VS Code remote development is already much better now, and only seems to get improved and extended more and more.
And then, going further, some online web version of PyCharm...
ssh -X
There should be a free tier as well as monthly options.
Maybe this will work for developing web applications which are executed on a remote machine by design, but everything else?
Edit: it also occurs to me that this could be Microsoft's big end-game from all of their recent dev-focused work and acquisitions (VSCode, NPM, GitHub, TypeScript, WSL, etc.). If they create a world where a significant fraction of developers who currently buy their dev environments from Apple start renting them from MS instead, that's a huge deal. And of course there's lots of potential for synergy with Azure on top of that.
I have a VPS that runs code-server and I use 'save as app' in Edge so that it captures control keys properly. It feels like it's native and using ssh tunnels it feels 99% native, and I can pick back up working on any computer.
I ended up with this set up because I have a Galaxy Book S and VS Code doesn't have an ARM build. Very excited!
What worries me is the consolidation of great resources in the hands of one party. We know from our collective experience since forever that concentration of any resource does not give us resilience.
Your thoughts?
I tried setting up Theia (https://theia-ide.org) on windows and it was definitely not ready for major use.
I didn't find anything else that fit the bill either, I hear something like this exists internally at google though.
I'm not typically a huge fan of Github (I'm sure that's a controversial opinion) but this is definitely something I'm going to check out.
Sadly I'm still falling short. :<
I haven't used GitHub in some time (using gitlab), so just wondering what are they using to run this stuff... because you'll probably need a fullyfleged container service with secret management and whatnot. Does GitHub already provide this?
Also I'm guessing the editor won't be using the same file system as the launched code, i.e. would hot reload be possible or do you have to commit and redeploy
Anyone have any ideas/speculations?
You simply prefix your GitHub (or gitlab) url with "gitpod.io/{your-repo} and you are instantly redirected to VM with with your repo cloned and ready to use, a fully customizable dev environment, vscode, extensions, machine is public on the internet so you can "npm start" and actually start serving your site.
However, if I get to make a teeny tiny feature request (Nat, if you're out there...) it would be about this:
> What if I don’t want to develop in a browser?
> If you prefer, you can open a codespace in GitHub and then connect to it in VS Code.
I really kinda wish I could do the oposite, kinda like how Google Drive's Colaboratory (essentially Jupyter Notebooks on Drive[0]) do: I would launch a CodeSpace on GitHub, and it would handle all of the UI and automation bits, but I would keep the "environment" hosted somewhere else (i.e. a Docker container exposing a CodeSpace agent/headless VSCode through localhost:8080 that my browser talks to)
All of the gears seem to be already in-place for this to be possible given:
> How is Codespaces different from VS Code?
> Codespaces sets up a cloud-hosted, containerized, and customizable VS Code environment. After set up, you can connect to a codespace through the browser or through VS Code.
The reasons for this are several:
- I bought a beefy computer for a reason, and want to use it. I don't want to pay boatloads of money to Azure to have equal firepower to what I currently have idling;
- From an SRE perspective, your code, several times needs to be "inside" your infrastructure to run properly (because of roles, latency, you might be running Data Loss Prevention solutions, what have you), and this allows me to point the CodeSpace to a dedicated instance I have running inside a VPN on my own infrastructure;
- There are more, but I don't want to make this too long and I'm failing to recall some of them.
So to sum it up: I think this is a potentially great feature, as long as it doesn't come coupled with the need to buy Azure instance time. This would (and I'm asserting this purely from my own gut, without a shred of evidence) probably lead to increased adoption for this feature, and as a corollary lead to selling more Azure instance time for those who do not want the hassle, without crippling those who actually need to keep some things "in-house".
Both repl.it and codesandbox.io seem to be Monaco based. This seems to have better support for VS Code extensions than what's available in Monaco.
I was a big fan of the idea of GitLab IDE, but never got too deep; it seemed like a great idea that could use more baking. But then I saw Theia and GitPod. I like GitPod, but I just wish it had better Github integration.
Well, yeah. So... good job Github. Can’t wait to try this one out.
Has vscode performance improved in recent history? Are there any plans to replace hot code paths with Rust or wasm? Has modal editing improved? I'm not against using vscode, but even with codespaces it's a hard sell.
[1]https://medium.com/google-cloud/developing-on-gcp-getting-st...
I was under the impression this bug is blocking VSCode and other electron based apps.
Does any CI solution already offer something like this?
I can't wait for a monorepo-friendly staging/development environment that works out of the box and can provide cross-language & generated code autocompletions for "every" language.
Gitlab has a decent web ide, I think this may be github playing catch up, but I'm hopeful that this competition gets us a better product on both sides.
Will the same happen to Azure Devops ?
God please no, especially if anyone from Atom is involved.
I almost didn't even try vscode in the first place after atom soured me on electron.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that statement isn't quite accurate.
Not the first IDE to have full-feature parity on desktop and web.
However, if you do need something based on open-source that works with GitLab, take a look at https://www.gitpod.io
You can even self-host it: https://www.gitpod.io/blog/gitpod-self-hosted-0.4.0/
No clue about GitLab integration. I don't see myself using a browser tab instead of an app to write code, and the app does have GitLab plugins, so I'm gonna go with probably.
Don’t think I would write a full app or module in this though.
It's also some pretty serious vertical integration for Github/Microsoft!
IDE: Github Source control + collaboration: Github CI/CD: Github Hosting: Github + Azure (with docker and azure functions that experience is pretty much already there technically?)
I hope they allow BYO-remote backend for compliance reasons. This feature seems amazing but I cannot use it.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/online/how-to/...
(I work on Azure but not on this product)
This is counterintuative to that.
Call me paranoid, but you'd have to be a madman to
* Store all of your source code with Microsoft (GitHub / npm)
* Now start authoring all of your said source code online with yet another Microsoft product
To thunderous applause from people who are fooled by the first element of that.
Soon the Platform will be renamed 'Microsost Visual Studio Github' or 'Microsoft team Github'. Then 'microsoft Visual studio hub'.
Then at somme point, Github will be inside Visual studio code online and not anymore the other way around!
Different people, different leadership, different strategy and an entirely innocuous product offering.
But people still find a way to relate it to EEE.
This is just them creating a one stop shop for developers by expanding what GitHub offers.
Nothing to do with EEE
Gitlab does.
It's sad to see GitHub moving slowly into spreading itself too thin, instead of just improving the platform they have. They now try to replace CI services, donation platforms and now remote code editors.
Seems their core service is still holding up so far, but with all these moves in different directions, I'm getting a bit worried that the SCM and software collaboration part will be left out. I think GitHub becoming SourceForgeV2 is closer than people think. It's bound to happen at one point.
People have been saying this every time GitHub has added a feature that wasn't SCM. How is this time any different?
> I think GitHub becoming SourceForgeV2 is closer than people think. It's bound to happen at one point.
How do you possibly jump from Codespaces to SourceForgeV2, and somehow proclaim it as certainty?
Aren't they in the category of "improving the platform they have"? What exactly do you want Github to be improved then?
I am not too worried about spreading themselves too thinly. GitHub Actions is much nicer than some of the competitors I used before (though I still love sr.ht builds).
Also, it would be bad for them not to branch out. GitLab is now a strong competitor and they also provide many features beyond code hosting, such as CI, registries, etc.
It is nice that there are three large players now (GitHub, GitLab, Atlassian). GitHub was stagnant for a while, but they seem to be moving fast again after GitLab became a serious competitor. It's a clear case where competition is benefitting the users, both in price and in platform capabilities.
They literally just made teams cheaper and added to their free tier.