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Comment by mgraczyk | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly, at Google the typical developer workflow (google3) is very cloud native.

Most devs write code in VS code in the browser. Many (most?) devs don't have a physical desktop any more, just a cloud VM. The code lives in a network mounted filesystem containing a repository. The repository is hosted remotely (everyone can see edits you make to any file nearly immediately). Builds are done remotely with a shared object cache. Tests typically run in the cloud (forge).

Facebook has similar infrastructure, although more pieces run locally (builds were mostly done on your VM circa 2020)

For my personal projects, I try to do most development on a cloud instance of some kind, collocated with the rest of the infrastructure.

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> Many (most?) devs don't have a physical desktop any more,

That would explain the (bad) design of their software.

What? Doesn't even make sense. Why would lacking a physical desktop cause developers to make bad software?

Many developers in now and before like to have their own desk/space it helps them think. Getting ride of that space or changing may not be optimal for many developers I've worked with.

Lol desktop meaning a physical computer. Engineers still have desks with tops. If anything they have more space than ever since the offices are so empty.

Not sure this follows. Their designs might be bad(?), but certainly for any UI driven applications, they do do use the native and emulated devices.

What OP means is that you ssh into a cloud machine for development.

I prefer the ability to run and debug locally coupled with a good IDE. I know VSCode is popular, people customize the shit out of Vim, but IntelliJ just works for me when I'm writing Java, Kotlin or Typescript/React. Refactor and debug is not comparable. And I know most think its hard on resources, but we have 200k lines of code yet and it works with 16GB M1 Air very well leaving more than enough spare resources for the system.

Having heard complaints of Google developers, the problem with this is the limitation of Chromium and the browser more generally. Browsers are utterly terrible at letting users script their own shortcut etc.

It's perfectly possible and in fact quite pleasant to work with intellij inside google. At least for JVM languages.

Disclaimer: I work for google

Wait, I remember Google gave up supporting IntelliJ around 2011, leaving only one full-featured IDE, Eclipse, as the only option. Did it change since 2011?

Support is still there in some way, Bazel support being officially integrated is probably a good external indicator.

The Perforce plugin is Piper compatible, and works really well.

That reversed in ~2016. Because Android Studio was based on IntelliJ and heavily staffed (including Blaze support for development of Google's own Android apps), TPTB decided that they should put their weight behind IntelliJ instead of Eclipse. Official internal support for Eclipse was discontinued and the Eclipse team was disbanded.

The problem is that developers have no idea how to run systems at a scale larger than their local Mac and iPhone.

> VS code at Google

MS have done a fantastic job of getting developers everywhere hooked on VS Code, whether they are writing for the Windows ecosystem or not.

I've also switched all my dev work to Gitpod a year ago and I don't want to go back to developing locally anymore. I curse and swear every time I need to work on a project locally.

I've had interest in trying this dev flow out, but I haven't been able to determine how it would work for multiple projects that work in concert.

For example, a web dashboard project with its own backend that also communicates with an API, which is a separate project.

Does Gitpod (or Codespaces) support projects (repositories) that work together?

Gitpod URLs are generated every time you start a new environment (usually every time you start working a new feature/bug fix), and it doesn't have static URLs. So you would need to update the endpoint URLs manually.

If you use VS Code locally to connect to Gitpod instead of in the browser, all URLs are mapped to localhost, so then it shouldn't be an issue.

But I did some digging and it looks like they're aware of this limitation and are working on solution: https://github.com/gitpod-io/gitpod/issues/898

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