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.
If this is about GitHub Actions specifically there is quite a bit of info at https://github.blog/2019-08-08-github-actions-now-supports-c.... My takeaway is that it's about packaging up Azure Pipelines in a way that GitHub users understand and complements other features. There are more jarring ways to integrate the products.
I didn't interpret the comment that way.
BTW, I'm not saying your interpretation is "not true" or "crazy" or anything like that. I just think it is better to keep this kind of (bad faith) interpretation private. I think it is useful to remember this HN guideline "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." [1]
The benefit, which is not spelled out there, is that if more of us do this, there will be fewer amplifications / chain-reactions of misinterpretations. This results in a more useful discussion.
I'm responsible for about 15 different Rails apps. These apps were built over the last 8 years and many have some nasty dependencies that make setting up a dev environment for them a pain. Or running tests a pain or whatever.
So many no one has touched in years but then some bug needs to be addressed in them. Today I have to get the app running again on my machine and there's always some silly timesink that makes the trivial change take too long.
For me ideally, I'd have two docker style images, one production, one test/development that just adds the dev resources to the production image. And then I could jump into any editor and see the changes live online without even installing docker on my machine.
Having a full dev system online means I can make changes from my phone, or really any internet connected device.
At this point, I don't have any interest in using such a system for my day to day work. But for my oddball stuff a well designed one would be great.
Clarification question: do you mean two images in total?
Perhaps you are saying that would cover all 15 Rails apps?
If your question is about who is asking for Github Codespaces, I'm not totally sure. Personally, for small changes it would be nice to be able to edit directly in Github but I certainly wouldn't pay for it. I imagine that core why behind this product release (besides the fact that most of this functionality was already pre-built and easy to reuse) is that it improves the user experience for anyone working from their chromeOS device, tablet and phone improving brand loyalty and capturing new users, especially students who may only have chromeOS devices.
I am unsure about this Github Codespaces though, I'll be testing it but I am fairly skeptical about invest a lot in Github-specific tooling beyond what is needed by a typical repo. It seems like Github has been trying to "extend" git into a proprietary phase for a while, and now with Microsoft backing it I'll wait to see if it's still the same old concept of locking you in deep and then do as they please. Not sure, it does look like they are going nice for now, but I personally prefer to wait.
This Codespaces doesn't solve a specific need I could point out like Actions did before, but maybe I'm just not their target.
I just used Glitch.com for the first time to set write and deploy a Node server in 10 minutes, and it was an incredible experience.
I imagine MS/GH will be selling to people like us the idea that we can simply make our GH repos the dev environments, and so all the access controls which we apply for managing interaction with the dev environment get us the appropriate dev environment for (effectively) free, and we throw out the desktop VMs.
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.
And secondly, work life balance, just because you can work while waiting in line for groceries doesn't mean you should
Obviously it's quite a narrow use case, but I imagine there are lots of similar cases where the review is simple for one reason or the other and you want to get it done quickly.
Secondly, work life balance is a choice. Glad you make it, no one should ever be coerced against it, but I want to choose what I do. I'd rather look at my company code than what Kim Kardashians butt looks like on the Us weekly issue in the aisle. Also a bit presumptuous to assume it's only work, I have a personal website as well and I actually want to work on that whenever I have downtime.
I don’t think I would spend a day writing on my phone, but it’s really useful having this mobile.
I also use GitLab and their “web ide” (I think it’s called) is nice for changes by non-developers who don’t ever have a dev environment. We use a lot of config and docs repos that analysts use to update project material and they use the browser exclusively. I also approve merge requests from my phone almost daily to regenerate the static sites.
Currently Github regularly completely freezes Chrome on my phone when viewing moderately large files. And I have a decently specced phone.
Super super super excited!
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.