6 ms·

Being cloud based is this "Code Anywhere", or "Code anywhere where you have Internet access"? The latter, in my case, would be "Code in less places than you cou

Being cloud based is this "Code Anywhere", or "Code anywhere where you have Internet access"? The latter, in my case, would be "Code in less places than you could with your laptop and standard offline dev tools."

ivan_burazin 11y ago
When was the last time you did any development without internet access though? I dont remeber the last time I did that.
- jasonkester 11y ago
  As Yoda would say, that is why you fail. I've spent entire months traveling with a laptop through places with no internet access. I've planned entire trips around the idea. Coding from a hammock on a tropical beach with nothing more exotic than a generator running for a few hours in the evening to keep the lights on and the beers cool in the bar (and your battery topped up). Sailing in remote parts of the Caribbean, with a little wind turbine on the boat to charge your machine (and again keep the beer cold). Hell, even trying to work from a coffee shop in England with their quaint idea of "internet" and "wifi" even in 2015. Your laptop weighs three pounds. Take it someplace nicer than your living room!
  - heartbreak 11y ago
    My clients don't exactly let me disappear for a few months while I'm completing a project.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - cubano 11y ago
    > As Yoda would say, that is why you fail... Wouldn't he have said "you fail, that is why"?
    - stronglikedan 11y ago
      Pedantic, but "Why you fail, that is."
    - jasonkester 11y ago
      but... but... it's an actual Yoda quote: http://i.imgur.com/z0pkveG.gif http://i.imgur.com/z0pkveG.gif
  - SwellJoe 11y ago
    I travelled in a motorhome full-time for four years and have returned to that lifestyle again recently. But, I still rarely write code when disconnected. I don't know how to code without the internet to answer questions, show me API examples, etc., anymore. I'm so much less productive when I try to work without internet, that I don't try. I can read, write, play games, or get off the computer and get my head right for work, during that downtime, but the idea of writing code without internet just doesn't appeal to me. We are beyond that point in terms of software complexity. Building things of value is no longer simple enough to do all on your own, a lone coder in the woods (or on the beach or on a boat). I'm curious how many of the things you've suggested are activities you've actually done while writing code? Sounds like a Corona commercial...not really a software engineering story.
    - jasonkester 11y ago
      Sorry if I wasn't clear that those were all real world examples from personal experience. Arusi, Columbia (a tiny fishing village a 2 hour launch from the nearest town where you can get an overnight boat to a city connected to the rest of the country by a road), Tonsai Beach, Thailand, back before they had power or internet. And a couple months sailing in the San Blas islands off Panama. Parks, campsites and random comfortable boulders in the forest are pretty regular worksites, even building real shipping products with paying customers. Even the dreaded English Coffee Shop really happened (I live there half the time and have a hard enough time getting BT to deliver internet to my house with any reliability). I find that a good IDE removes pretty much all the Googling from my life. I know what you mean though, having written my share of Ruby and Python, where you're constantly on Google trying to remind yourself what order to pass parameters to File.Open(), and completely aswim with a 3rd party API. But Intellisense knows everything there is to know about C#, Javascript, CSS, etc. and will either tell me about it or just finish writing my line of code for me with a quick key chord. I tend not to rely on 3rd party code for simple things I can write myself, so I don't spend as much time Googling React or Angular into submission as your average modern dev. For genuine 3rd party APIs like AWS or Stripe, you're right. It's hard to test that stuff until you're back online. They all have libraries though, and again the IDE has your back as far as implementation is concerned. Good luck with the RV life! http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/uploaded_images/parrot_vs_keyboard.jpg http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/uploaded_images/parrot... http://www.blogabond.com/Photos/PhotoView.aspx?imageID=8479 http://www.blogabond.com/Photos/PhotoView.aspx?imageID=8479 http://www.blogabond.com/Photos/PhotoView.aspx?imageID=992 http://www.blogabond.com/Photos/PhotoView.aspx?imageID=992
- mirsadm 11y ago
  My current IDE works just fine with or without internet access. I don't remember the last time I needed to code on a computer besides my own (which is the only use I can think for this, or maybe on something like an iPad Pro).
- booli 11y ago
  1) Airplane? 2) On the road traveling in a far country where 4G(or any data) is still too expensive? 3) Train from Amsterdam -> Paris, worst data ever. 4) etc..
  - ivan_burazin 11y ago
    Would a Offline/Cache mode solve this? Most places now (including planes) have Internet, it can be spotty, but I mean a lot of Browser based apps today continue working even if you're not online and then sync everything you have done once Internet is back. In these situation you won't even notice if your link drops here or there.
    - danieldk 11y ago
      I am still not sure what problem this is trying to solve. I can imagine that for beginners, not having to set up a development environment is an advantage of a web app. But setting up JDK and IntelliJ|Eclipse|NetBeans typically takes five or ten minutes. After that you can use your environment everywhere and have a native experience (as far as native is possible using Java ;)). It will be fast with or without internet, it will continue to work as-is when the company creating the IDE goes under or decides to double prices, I can use it with local tools (Git, Mercurial, JVisualVM), and my secret sauce does not end up on somebody else's server.
      - ivan_burazin 11y ago
        But isn't your "secret sauce" already on some else's servers? Like GitHub or BitBucket? What would be the exact difference here? Really and honestly interest in your thoughts. Thanks :)
        saurik 11y ago
        You make it sound like hosting a git repository is hard or something and so the basic assumption is that obviously anyone using git is going to be using GitHub... if you have ssh access to absolutely any server you can just do a git init --bare on the server and a git remote add on the client to let you do a git push, and with a single file rename to activate a default provided post commit hook you can turn on remote access if the folder is accessible via HTTP. You might not even need a server: the fundamental beauty of git is that it is a distributed resource. What value is GitHub adding? It would be one thing if they offered good services surrounding git (such as an issue tracker that was worth using), but they don't.
- bencollier49 11y ago
  Every day on the train. Like, 1.5 hours every day.
  - reitanqild 11y ago
    3h for me ATM. Has been like this for a few months and is surprisingly effective.
    - bencollier49 11y ago
      I do personal projects on the train mostly. The only nuisances are obscure programming references and pip. Can generally move to another problem if I'm blocked though.
      - reitanqild 11y ago
        I'm lucky, work for smart people who realized that if they wanted me to sign they had to yield on where. (Or as they put it: we don't understand what you do anyway and we trust you, so whatever you want as long as you show up most of the days.) Edit: Used to work on personal projects in a previous job that included long commutes. For me it is often the best time of the day for programming: Nobody to interrupt, few distractions, a very specific start time and stop time.
- diggs 11y ago
  When flying, so quite a bit for me, actually :)
- harperlee 11y ago
  Please don't assume that internet is there always. Lots of regions in the world don't. Further, even if it is there, if you have bad reception, assuming a good connection is in place hurts the experience. If you design your product as "connection is needed for some things", it will be way better than "connection is always perfect". As an example, I hate when I'm about to read a webpage opened previously on my browser, and then somehow, something triggers a refresh, I don't have good reception, and I need to wait minutes for the page. One person assumed connection will be quick and it is ok to discard my copy and wait with a blank page until the next one loads; another assumed that huge pages are ok, and putting the content last in the html is also ok, and then, I end up without the content.
  - ivan_burazin 11y ago
    Totally agree, and although Codeanywhere is not there yet. We are currently taking steps to enable this exactly. If you internet "breaks" that Codeanywhere won't it will just work (sans things a connection is needed for) and when ist back it will just continue :)
- stephenr 11y ago
  How about developing where WAN speed is not brilliant or the connection is unreliable. Honestly this would be like saying "GitHub doesn't accept git pushes anymore, all changes to files have to be made through the Web UI".
- polar 11y ago
  Every day, on the wrong side of an air gap.
- thesz 11y ago
  You cannot do something original doing what everyone else is doing. Everyone else accessing Internet when developing programs. http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html Myself, I'd be glad to be disconnected. But it is hard in our world right now. Still, I try to do as much without access to internet as I could.
- girvo 11y ago
  Hacker News is kind of funny, in that is it full of the developers that are those who do exactly that! Though, you're right: in your target market (HTML, Node, PHP devs) it's a much safer assumption that they'll be developing with internet access.
  - ivan_burazin 11y ago
    Exactly, we are not going for devs other the web devs, that's our target, that's who we serve and in the end - that's who we are. We in Codeanywhere are web devs, and we made Codeanywhere for us :)
- forgottenpass 11y ago
  edit: Wait, nevermind. I edited out my response. I was trying to have an honest conversation. I didn't know you had a product that you had to stick up for the usage model of. Always-connected working is widespread enough that you can sell the product you sell, but pretending like it's a well-established hard requirement everyone easily meets is bullshit.
- other_herbert 11y ago
  Sitting in a coffee shop in a tiny town while visiting my inlaws... granted I did work for about 2 hours offline, then used my phone to connect and check in what I'd done....
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  When I need to hunker down and get things done, I turn off network, etc. It really isn't that important to development. Only checking in changes and you don't have to do that every five minutes no matter what some blog says.
- cartoonfoxes 11y ago
  While in the air, or at a field location, or any of a hundred cafes, restaurants, even the occasional conference venue. Downed internet connections, and unavailable hotspot passwords are a real thing. I probably log a reliable 10 hours a months of offline work, though have had occasion to do much more than that at a single stretch. As someone who isn't a web developer, the question seems ludicrous to me. It's important to note that when you need to do offline development, you need to do offline development. A toolchain that requires an active internet connection is still fundamentally unreliable, even in 2015.

ivan_burazin 11y ago

When was the last time you did any development without internet access though? I dont remeber the last time I did that.

jasonkester 11y ago
As Yoda would say, that is why you fail. I've spent entire months traveling with a laptop through places with no internet access. I've planned entire trips around the idea. Coding from a hammock on a tropical beach with nothing more exotic than a generator running for a few hours in the evening to keep the lights on and the beers cool in the bar (and your battery topped up). Sailing in remote parts of the Caribbean, with a little wind turbine on the boat to charge your machine (and again keep the beer cold). Hell, even trying to work from a coffee shop in England with their quaint idea of "internet" and "wifi" even in 2015. Your laptop weighs three pounds. Take it someplace nicer than your living room!
- heartbreak 11y ago
  My clients don't exactly let me disappear for a few months while I'm completing a project.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- cubano 11y ago
  > As Yoda would say, that is why you fail... Wouldn't he have said "you fail, that is why"?
  - stronglikedan 11y ago
    Pedantic, but "Why you fail, that is."
  - jasonkester 11y ago
    but... but... it's an actual Yoda quote: http://i.imgur.com/z0pkveG.gif http://i.imgur.com/z0pkveG.gif
- SwellJoe 11y ago
  I travelled in a motorhome full-time for four years and have returned to that lifestyle again recently. But, I still rarely write code when disconnected. I don't know how to code without the internet to answer questions, show me API examples, etc., anymore. I'm so much less productive when I try to work without internet, that I don't try. I can read, write, play games, or get off the computer and get my head right for work, during that downtime, but the idea of writing code without internet just doesn't appeal to me. We are beyond that point in terms of software complexity. Building things of value is no longer simple enough to do all on your own, a lone coder in the woods (or on the beach or on a boat). I'm curious how many of the things you've suggested are activities you've actually done while writing code? Sounds like a Corona commercial...not really a software engineering story.
  - jasonkester 11y ago
    Sorry if I wasn't clear that those were all real world examples from personal experience. Arusi, Columbia (a tiny fishing village a 2 hour launch from the nearest town where you can get an overnight boat to a city connected to the rest of the country by a road), Tonsai Beach, Thailand, back before they had power or internet. And a couple months sailing in the San Blas islands off Panama. Parks, campsites and random comfortable boulders in the forest are pretty regular worksites, even building real shipping products with paying customers. Even the dreaded English Coffee Shop really happened (I live there half the time and have a hard enough time getting BT to deliver internet to my house with any reliability). I find that a good IDE removes pretty much all the Googling from my life. I know what you mean though, having written my share of Ruby and Python, where you're constantly on Google trying to remind yourself what order to pass parameters to File.Open(), and completely aswim with a 3rd party API. But Intellisense knows everything there is to know about C#, Javascript, CSS, etc. and will either tell me about it or just finish writing my line of code for me with a quick key chord. I tend not to rely on 3rd party code for simple things I can write myself, so I don't spend as much time Googling React or Angular into submission as your average modern dev. For genuine 3rd party APIs like AWS or Stripe, you're right. It's hard to test that stuff until you're back online. They all have libraries though, and again the IDE has your back as far as implementation is concerned. Good luck with the RV life! http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/uploaded_images/parrot_vs_keyboard.jpg http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/uploaded_images/parrot... http://www.blogabond.com/Photos/PhotoView.aspx?imageID=8479 http://www.blogabond.com/Photos/PhotoView.aspx?imageID=8479 http://www.blogabond.com/Photos/PhotoView.aspx?imageID=992 http://www.blogabond.com/Photos/PhotoView.aspx?imageID=992
mirsadm 11y ago
My current IDE works just fine with or without internet access. I don't remember the last time I needed to code on a computer besides my own (which is the only use I can think for this, or maybe on something like an iPad Pro).
booli 11y ago
1) Airplane? 2) On the road traveling in a far country where 4G(or any data) is still too expensive? 3) Train from Amsterdam -> Paris, worst data ever. 4) etc..
- ivan_burazin 11y ago
  Would a Offline/Cache mode solve this? Most places now (including planes) have Internet, it can be spotty, but I mean a lot of Browser based apps today continue working even if you're not online and then sync everything you have done once Internet is back. In these situation you won't even notice if your link drops here or there.
  - danieldk 11y ago
    I am still not sure what problem this is trying to solve. I can imagine that for beginners, not having to set up a development environment is an advantage of a web app. But setting up JDK and IntelliJ|Eclipse|NetBeans typically takes five or ten minutes. After that you can use your environment everywhere and have a native experience (as far as native is possible using Java ;)). It will be fast with or without internet, it will continue to work as-is when the company creating the IDE goes under or decides to double prices, I can use it with local tools (Git, Mercurial, JVisualVM), and my secret sauce does not end up on somebody else's server.
    - ivan_burazin 11y ago
      But isn't your "secret sauce" already on some else's servers? Like GitHub or BitBucket? What would be the exact difference here? Really and honestly interest in your thoughts. Thanks :)
      - saurik 11y ago
        You make it sound like hosting a git repository is hard or something and so the basic assumption is that obviously anyone using git is going to be using GitHub... if you have ssh access to absolutely any server you can just do a git init --bare on the server and a git remote add on the client to let you do a git push, and with a single file rename to activate a default provided post commit hook you can turn on remote access if the folder is accessible via HTTP. You might not even need a server: the fundamental beauty of git is that it is a distributed resource. What value is GitHub adding? It would be one thing if they offered good services surrounding git (such as an issue tracker that was worth using), but they don't.
bencollier49 11y ago
Every day on the train. Like, 1.5 hours every day.
- reitanqild 11y ago
  3h for me ATM. Has been like this for a few months and is surprisingly effective.
  - bencollier49 11y ago
    I do personal projects on the train mostly. The only nuisances are obscure programming references and pip. Can generally move to another problem if I'm blocked though.
    - reitanqild 11y ago
      I'm lucky, work for smart people who realized that if they wanted me to sign they had to yield on where. (Or as they put it: we don't understand what you do anyway and we trust you, so whatever you want as long as you show up most of the days.) Edit: Used to work on personal projects in a previous job that included long commutes. For me it is often the best time of the day for programming: Nobody to interrupt, few distractions, a very specific start time and stop time.
diggs 11y ago
When flying, so quite a bit for me, actually :)
harperlee 11y ago
Please don't assume that internet is there always. Lots of regions in the world don't. Further, even if it is there, if you have bad reception, assuming a good connection is in place hurts the experience. If you design your product as "connection is needed for some things", it will be way better than "connection is always perfect". As an example, I hate when I'm about to read a webpage opened previously on my browser, and then somehow, something triggers a refresh, I don't have good reception, and I need to wait minutes for the page. One person assumed connection will be quick and it is ok to discard my copy and wait with a blank page until the next one loads; another assumed that huge pages are ok, and putting the content last in the html is also ok, and then, I end up without the content.
- ivan_burazin 11y ago
  Totally agree, and although Codeanywhere is not there yet. We are currently taking steps to enable this exactly. If you internet "breaks" that Codeanywhere won't it will just work (sans things a connection is needed for) and when ist back it will just continue :)
stephenr 11y ago
How about developing where WAN speed is not brilliant or the connection is unreliable. Honestly this would be like saying "GitHub doesn't accept git pushes anymore, all changes to files have to be made through the Web UI".
polar 11y ago
Every day, on the wrong side of an air gap.
thesz 11y ago
You cannot do something original doing what everyone else is doing. Everyone else accessing Internet when developing programs. http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html Myself, I'd be glad to be disconnected. But it is hard in our world right now. Still, I try to do as much without access to internet as I could.
girvo 11y ago
Hacker News is kind of funny, in that is it full of the developers that are those who do exactly that! Though, you're right: in your target market (HTML, Node, PHP devs) it's a much safer assumption that they'll be developing with internet access.
- ivan_burazin 11y ago
  Exactly, we are not going for devs other the web devs, that's our target, that's who we serve and in the end - that's who we are. We in Codeanywhere are web devs, and we made Codeanywhere for us :)
forgottenpass 11y ago
edit: Wait, nevermind. I edited out my response. I was trying to have an honest conversation. I didn't know you had a product that you had to stick up for the usage model of. Always-connected working is widespread enough that you can sell the product you sell, but pretending like it's a well-established hard requirement everyone easily meets is bullshit.
other_herbert 11y ago
Sitting in a coffee shop in a tiny town while visiting my inlaws... granted I did work for about 2 hours offline, then used my phone to connect and check in what I'd done....
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
When I need to hunker down and get things done, I turn off network, etc. It really isn't that important to development. Only checking in changes and you don't have to do that every five minutes no matter what some blog says.
cartoonfoxes 11y ago
While in the air, or at a field location, or any of a hundred cafes, restaurants, even the occasional conference venue. Downed internet connections, and unavailable hotspot passwords are a real thing. I probably log a reliable 10 hours a months of offline work, though have had occasion to do much more than that at a single stretch. As someone who isn't a web developer, the question seems ludicrous to me. It's important to note that when you need to do offline development, you need to do offline development. A toolchain that requires an active internet connection is still fundamentally unreliable, even in 2015.