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Comment by n8cpdx | Hacker News Reader

Very cool stuff.

I remember being at Build 2018 and asking the PM on the Live Share team if they had any plans to bring VS Code to the browser. Maybe do managed environments for labs and companies (what GitHub code spaces now is), would be great for education. Lots of students (especially non-CS nerds, like the physics kids with a CS requirement) find environment setup to be one of the hardest parts. He seemed to think I was a piece of shit for not ‘getting’ what Live Share was all about and how those other offerings (code spaces, running in the browser without install) were bad ideas not worth considering.

I think the moral of the story is, if you’re a PM, don’t treat your most enthusiastic customers like shit. Or maybe do, because it won’t actually have business impact.

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I'm really sorry to hear you had this experience :( I'm not sure who you spoke with, but this perspective definitely isn't representative of the team and/or how I'd ever want to see us talk with developers.

I'm actually a PM for both Live Share, Codespaces, and some of our education-related experiences (e.g. the GitHub Classroom extension for VS Code). A web client for collaboration, with zero-install/onboarding, has always been our north star, and so your intuition/feedback was 100% right back in 2018.

Now that we have Codespaces, vscode.dev/github.dev, and Live Share support for the web, we're actually looking to further optimize our support for education, since we believe we have a lot to offer. In fact, I'd love to connect and hear your thoughts, to make sure we're going in the right direction. If you'd be interested in letting me make up for that terrible conversation in 2018, you can reach me at joncart@microsoft.com. Thanks for sharing this feedback, and letting us know where we can do better.

Hey! I'm curious how vscode.dev fits in with GitHub Codespaces. Are they competing products, or is Codespaces only a superset of the other?

On every HN thread I count the minutes until it turns into a personal rant against some big company, and it never disappoints.

And while those stories are interesting to hear, I don’t know why they so often make it to the top or near it. Like is one PM being bad at listening to user feedback really the most interesting topic of discussion for this post?

Well .. yes actually. VS in the browser is not that amazing - we already got it on https://github.dev a month ago

codesandbox.io had VSCode running in the browser in March 2019. https://codesandbox.io/post/announcing-codesandbox-v3

The truth is most people lack the skills required to understand and comment of most things posted here. They also have a "need" to get involved in discussions, thus they cling to what they know/understand.

This is why you get these anecdotes upvoted, this is why you get "options" on most "Show HN" threads.

They're almost as tedious as

"I want to share an anecdote about me that is tangentially related to the article. I'm not going to comment on the article, but the title reminded me of something that I thought of once, or maybe something that happened to me. I'm pretty smart so I'll share it with my fellow smart people here now. It's about me.

Back in 2003 I was running an FTP server from my garage. It was running on one of the new Slackware BSD boxes that were popular at the time. We didn't have many users but one that we did have was Jamie Zawinski - actually he was my roommate at the time.

We used to spend most evenings coming up with new compression algorithms and practicing Vim exit sequences and ..."

Yeah anyway I'm not a HN comment generator AI but it's crazy how many comments here are just "let me tell you a story about me".

Have you noticed that you just described “conversation”?

That is what it looks like when people get together and talk to each other. Lots of us are here for that, and it seems like a pretty natural thing to do. The articles do a nice job of suggesting topics to talk about.

It reminds me of conversations I used to have with an autistic guy who didn't really get conversational cues. He would just come out with facts that didn't at all fit the flow of the conversation.

In any case I don't think the point of the articles is just to be a conversation starter.

Have you considered bird watching or needlepoint?

the thing i enjoy about watching that in HN vs reddit or some other ranty site is that at least on HN the actual people being ranted AT will often show up.

It happens on twitter too apparently but then I would have to use twitter.

As a CS student we used Cloud9 IDE for developing and code sharing in assignments -- we didn't know what Git was and using it didn't become a requirement until later semesters. "Don't touch anything, let me compile first" was a common utterance.

Haven't looked into it for a while, apparently it was bought by Amazon and you need an AWS account? Back then it was just open the site and you're coding

If you really want to use something like that, Harvard's CS50 has made it available freely (under their own wrapper of tools): https://ide.cs50.io

Speaking of education/CS50: we (the Codespaces/Live Share team) have actually been very excited/privileged to collaborate with the amazing CS50 team, as they've built their student experience on top of VS Code/Codespaces (http://code.cs50.io). Lowering the barrier of entry for learners, and supporting student success, is a huge goal of ours, and so I'm looking forward to getting our tools in the hands of more developers, and iterating based on feedback.

This is really cool

Very cool of Harvard to keep c9 alive, I have fond memory of it. Having said, vscode is just superior in everyway.

The open source version is still available as c9sdk on GH, some docker images are available on dockerhub

Just a side note... as a CS nerd and a software engineer with 15+ years of professional experience, environment setup is still one of the hardest parts for me, especially if I'm picking up a new tech stack.

It's tedious because you'll always run into an error even if following documentation. Automated dev environment setup ftw

The PM on the live share feature only gets a promotion if they can prove the value and engagement of their feature. Sadly this leads to very close-minded and hostile attitudes at different levels in the product. You want to talk to the group PM for the VS code product to pitch an idea about new features (but you aren't going to see this person spending time at a trade show booth).

It seems like this person had the wrong personality to man a conference booth.

Being a PM with a closed mind doesn’t qualify you. Seeing conferences as opportunities to learn new ideas or even hearing from existing customers can bring a lot of value.

Heya, Geoff from Gitpod here.

> Maybe do managed environments for labs and companies (what GitHub code spaces now is), would be great for education.

I agree. There is an entire class of problems that attendees and educators continue to put up with when they shouldn’t need to because these concerns can be removed through automation. I dumped my thoughts about this over at https://www.gitpod.io/blog/workshops-as-code

> "Lots of students (especially non-CS nerds, like the physics kids with a CS requirement) find environment setup to be one of the hardest parts."

Advice I received early that has stuck with me (and that I have found to be true): "Environment setup is the hardest part".

This was true for me in school and has remained true through multiple professional teams.

And always assume when a customer tells you something like that that YOU are the one that doesn't get it.

Otherwise, you might be the one that gets fired, probably like this guy.

We built lab.computer for this. Root access, state save, sharing, auto/manual grading. We would love to get some feedback. Everyone using it seems to love it.

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