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I'm really hesitant to invest in VSC Remote because I feel like it's a slippery slope to a world where we can't compile software on our own computers anymore

by skohan 6y ago

reaperducer 6y ago
I feel like it's a slippery slope to a world where we can't compile software on our own computers anymore To me it feels more like going back to the way things used to be. Reminds me of when I used to do my work by pushing buttons on a Wang terminal in one state, and the PR1MEOS machine that I was actually working on was several hundred miles away. Maybe as our work becomes more complex, it makes sense to return to thin clients.
- skohan 6y ago
  But is it necessary complexity? The average laptop is orders of magnitude more powerful than servers were back then. Which workloads besides maybe ML training actually need that much more power than you can get easily locally?
  - cpuguy83 6y ago
    VSCode has completely solved the complexity problem at the interface layer. It is quite literally like you are running it locally (because you are), but the commands are executed against a remote backend. Extensions are managed per host and just work naturally... it even tells you what extensions you don't have installed on the host (but do have on the local instance). It works extremely well.
    - skohan 6y ago
      Yeah but what I mean is that is a lot of extra complexity, compared with just building code on your own workstation. I would rather use my workstation's CPU & memory resources to actually compile the code rather than masking the complexity of moving that compilation process onto hardware which I do not own.
- spicybright 6y ago
  I think the concept of thin clients is where we should be heading, especially now that internet is so much better. The kicker is who owns the super computer you're dialing into, and how much of it you actually own. "Back in the day" it probably made sense for a company to maintain their own servers. But now it's too profitable to not use amazon in most cases. It's nice not needing a server room, but hat suffers is ownership issues with infra and data, accepting the outages, and rolling with the crazy decisions amazon might make in the future that will effect your systems.
ryan29 6y ago
Yep. On one hand, dev containers could be really awesome. Imagine being able to spin up an old dev container to fix a bug in an old project. Ex: I added a tiny feature to a 5+ year old Java app last year and it took me longer to get the dev/build environment fixed up than it did to add the feature. A 5 year old dev container would have been awesome at the time. On the other hand, I'm worried it's going to be used to (attempt to) "take away" our ability to compile locally rather than giving us an amazing, immutable, local dev environment.

I'm really hesitant to invest in VSC Remote because I feel like it's a slippery slope to a world where we can't compile software on our own computers anymore

by skohan 6y ago

I'm really hesitant to invest in VSC Remote because I feel like it's a slippery slope to a world where we can't compile software on our own computers anymore

reaperducer 6y ago

I feel like it's a slippery slope to a world where we can't compile software on our own computers anymore To me it feels more like going back to the way things used to be. Reminds me of when I used to do my work by pushing buttons on a Wang terminal in one state, and the PR1MEOS machine that I was actually working on was several hundred miles away. Maybe as our work becomes more complex, it makes sense to return to thin clients.

skohan 6y ago
But is it necessary complexity? The average laptop is orders of magnitude more powerful than servers were back then. Which workloads besides maybe ML training actually need that much more power than you can get easily locally?
- cpuguy83 6y ago
  VSCode has completely solved the complexity problem at the interface layer. It is quite literally like you are running it locally (because you are), but the commands are executed against a remote backend. Extensions are managed per host and just work naturally... it even tells you what extensions you don't have installed on the host (but do have on the local instance). It works extremely well.
  - skohan 6y ago
    Yeah but what I mean is that is a lot of extra complexity, compared with just building code on your own workstation. I would rather use my workstation's CPU & memory resources to actually compile the code rather than masking the complexity of moving that compilation process onto hardware which I do not own.
spicybright 6y ago
I think the concept of thin clients is where we should be heading, especially now that internet is so much better. The kicker is who owns the super computer you're dialing into, and how much of it you actually own. "Back in the day" it probably made sense for a company to maintain their own servers. But now it's too profitable to not use amazon in most cases. It's nice not needing a server room, but hat suffers is ownership issues with infra and data, accepting the outages, and rolling with the crazy decisions amazon might make in the future that will effect your systems.

ryan29 6y ago

Yep. On one hand, dev containers could be really awesome. Imagine being able to spin up an old dev container to fix a bug in an old project. Ex: I added a tiny feature to a 5+ year old Java app last year and it took me longer to get the dev/build environment fixed up than it did to add the feature. A 5 year old dev container would have been awesome at the time. On the other hand, I'm worried it's going to be used to (attempt to) "take away" our ability to compile locally rather than giving us an amazing, immutable, local dev environment.