9 ms·
I would quit so fast if my company forced me to use a web IDE.
by blueplanet200 5y ago
I would quit so fast if my company forced me to use a web IDE.
- fridif 5y agoI write all my code on my personal laptop and then retype it into my company's IDE
- eru 5y agoI wonder if that's against your employment contract.
- fridif 5y agoProbably, but I am more likely to be fired for not doing work
- eru 5y agoYou might get fired plus sued.
- fridif 5y agoThis is a sentiment that is very typical among Singaporeans. I suspect it has something to do with the political/business climate over there. While the USA is also litigation happy, it actually takes an incredibly high amount of deliberate destruction for an employer to succeed in suing an employee.
- eru 5y agoI'm just an immigrant here. I don't think it's very likely you'd get sued, but I wouldn't want to risk it against well funded adversaries with expensive lawyers.
- stuff4ben 5y agoThat seems unnecessarily complex and time-consuming. Unless your company's work machine is locked down and you can't be productive on it...
- dangfang 5y agosame but i copy paste
- mattnewton 5y agoDon't you then have to maintain a copy of all the dependencies and input data on your personal laptop? I can't imagine myself being productive this way, even for small standalone projects where cloning everything to the personal laptop is feasible. This sounds awful and the company IDE must be even worse somehow.
- jamil7 5y agoReminds me of a project many years ago where I was forced to use a companies crappy home-grown CMS that deployed all their microsites, they had a weird code editor that they expected you to develop in inside the CMS. I wrote a selenium script that would login and upload the contents of my local files into the editor.
- minimaxir 5y agoI'm in the GitHub Codespaces personal beta: counterintuitively, the UI/UX of Codespaces is as performant as VS Code on the desktop.
- blueplanet200 5y agoI also don't use VS Code usually. My personal preference is a JetBrains IDE, but my point is more engineers should be able to choose the environment they're most productive in.
- t3rabytes 5y agoJetbrains has a hosted-IDE pilot project: https://lp.jetbrains.com/projector/ https://lp.jetbrains.com/projector/
- dynamicwebpaige 5y agoCurrently, VS Code is the primary method of connection to each Codespace, and we do not support other editors officially. If you’re looking to connect via SSH, we do have a workaround here: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-dev-containers/blob/main/script-library/docs/sshd.md https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-dev-containers/blob/main... -- and I use this regularly for Jupyter Notebooks.
- pritambaral 5y agoThat looks cumbersome enough to sound like you guys are trying to discourage the method entirely. A custom password that has to be copied and pasted every time? A lot fewer people will put up with that for long enough, and I'm sure whoever came up with that and whoever approved it, they all know this.
- random_kris 5y agoHow is the performance on jetbrain IDE. I love webstorm & intellij but they are Soo slow compared to vscode for me. At first I liked them because they have lots of great functionalities out of the box, but vscode has caught up and just yesterday I switched back to vscode from jetbrains. For java spring and react
- pegler 5y agoI am wary of requiring an internet connection in order to develop, but there seem to be more and more advantages to using something like Codespaces. The article describes using pretty much any IDE, so they are just offloading the setup and running of the development environment to the cloud while letting you run your preferred IDE locally.
- thomascgalvin 5y agoAn internet connection is already required for dependency management and stack overflow. I already develop with an always-on connection.
- gnull 5y agoDependency management is usually not a big part of programmer workflow (unless you are a devops or something). Download dependencies and docs, go offline, write code. People who try working offline are exactly the people who want to do it without Stackoverflow.
- ryanianian 5y agoThey're also the people least likely to want to use this kind of setup in my experience. My company has a remote VSCode setup not that dissimilar from this setup. Big C++ codebase. Many engineers love it, even some of the "old timers." Our interns can be productive on day one and it brings a lot of productivity to not have to worry about caring for your dev environment. But there are plenty of people who really just want to SSH into a beefy desktop (or directly edit on that desktop) and use their vim/emacs setups. These are the people who know how the whole build stack works, can debug the vscode/codespace magic, and can do amazing things not available in the VSCode plugin library. So it's good to be able to do both. Allow power users to use their own tools, but don't require everyone to be a power user to sit down and write some business logic. Give nice rails to ride but don't require them.
- tshaddox 5y agoAn internet connection is also required for fairly important things like pushing your code, giving and receiving code reviews, etc.
- verdverm 5y agoNote that they mainly use VS Code and also support vim and emacs.
- gosukiwi 5y agoLike, Vim and Emacs keybindings? Or real Vim and Emacs? It's quite different xD
- blueplanet200 5y agoThey let you ssh in. So you can run vim/emacs on the machine if you want.
- ansible 5y agoYou can ssh in and run actual editors.
- toastal 5y agoOkay? That's three editors and there are hundreds of others (though probably <25 that are used by more than a few people). There are sizeable followings for other CLI editors like Neovim, Kakoune, Yi, etc.
- kyrra 5y ago(googler, opinions are my own). Google allows for normal desktop IDEs, plus having a web based one. The funny thing is, many people move to the web based one because it is so good. But Google is also unique in how piper/citc[0] (our source control) works. It's effectively designed for web/cloud based style development, so the workflow for web based dev and desktop dev are effectively the same. So web dev can work, but I don't think the existing tech that most of the software industry has is built well to support it. [0] https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stores-billions-of-lines-of-code-in-a-single-repository/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stor...
- closeparen 5y agoWe also "allow" both but the size of the repo and build process are quickly getting out of hand for something to run on a laptop. In the past we had tools to manage the size of what an IDE had to index, etc. but these were abandoned in favor of the cloud effort, so to develop locally with any sanity you have to use years-old IDE versions and pretty much debug it yourself. The cloud environment builds and runs faster but the autocomplete, go-to-definition, etc. are pathetic.
- kchr 5y agoInteresting, can you elaborate a bit on "cloud-based" development vs for example a traditional workflow of git and a central repo?
- kchr 5y agoShould've read the entire post first. o\
- Me1000 5y agoGoogle has a monorepo in which nearly all of the company's code is stored. The monorepo uses a custom implementation of Perforce. No personal computer could download a whole copy of the repo. So for that reason people need to check out a virtual/cloud copy of the repo in order to do work. This has the added benefit (for google) of not allowing individuals to have code on their device which is bad if the employee loses their device or has it stolen. There are some exceptions for some teams (like Chrome). And when I was there exceptions for people who did mobile (iOS/Android) development, though Google was moving pretty aggressively towards a world where even iOS code wasn't allowed on the employee's device.
- knoebber 5y agoThe article specifically says that they support their vim and emacs users by allowing them to SSH in edit code.
- blueplanet200 5y agoThe article says they support web based development, or ssh'ing into the codespaces machine. There are other IDEs besides VS Code and shell based ones.
- mastax 5y agoDon't most IDE's have the ability to edit remote files over SSH? I know VSCode can, and I remember reading a comment from an emacs user doing that. It looks like IntelliJ can do that too, though it seems to edit local copies of files and sync over SSH. There's also SSHFS, though I don't know how good of an experience that is. It can be a pain to set up, but is it more of a pain than setting up a dev environment the old fashioned way?
- tptacek 5y agoEmacs has TRAMP, which does a very credible job of making remote resources appear local, not just to edits but to most Emacs libraries as well. Its most normal mode of operation is over SSH. It's not very hard to set up and it's pretty magical once it is. Even Magit just works. I was skeptical earlier this year, but 6 months later I'm doing 80-90% of my development in TRAMP buffers without thinking about it.
- blueplanet200 5y agoGood point! I suspect the issue will be running tests. From what I gather they did all this to save developers the pain of compiling ruby gems + specific stuff on your environment (which can be a huge pain...) If you edit a file using some sync over ssh option, and want to run a test - how do you proceed? And how is this not the same thing as just checking out the git repo locally in the first place?
- wincent 5y agoGitHub isn't forcing anybody to use a web IDE. The most broadly used access interface is VSCode. Then there are heretics like me who choose to ssh in so we can use Vim. This is described in the article.
- blueplanet200 5y agoHow does setting up a desktop IDE work?
- dynamicwebpaige 5y agoCurrently, VS Code is the primary method of connection to each Codespace, and we do not support other editors officially. If you’re looking to connect via SSH with your desktop IDE, we do have a workaround here: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-dev-containers/blob/main/script-library/docs/sshd.md https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-dev-containers/blob/main... -- and I use this regularly for Jupyter Notebooks. :)
- blueplanet200 5y agoSo if I want to use IntelliJ or RubyMine, is there a workaround?
- throwaway_fjmr 5y agoYeah, go work somewhere else :))))) /s Jetbrains recently added remote capabilities to IntelliJ, I'm hoping it's going to be usable with codespaces soon.
- micro_cam 5y agoThis (quick to provision vms of any size you want with your code base etc) for jupyter sounds like a colab and mode killer...the way both of those make it hard to actually check in code leads to a ton of copy and paste code etc. You all should really advertise this capability.
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- justicezyx 5y agoI would be happy to let go of an employee who bank their employment on the preference of toolings. Hear me out: Toolings are, like the name suggests, a means to an end. If a web IDE is fast, works reasonably, and can continue improve itself. And the learning curve is friendly to engineers with different background and experience. Everyone should be comfortable to be nudged to use it. And if the tool additionally is a critical product of the organization, everyone should be comfortable to be mandated to use it, because it's now a very valuable source of dogfooding.
- dangfang 5y agoI'd absolutely never work with someone so arrogant (and, for lack of a more polite word, dumb, as you). When I work for someone, I do the work they ask me and in return they pay me AND I get to learn something. For my learning process, I need the work part to be over fast. And that means I need to use stuff that I works best for me. I also need to be able to be able to fulfill my potential and spend time doing actual work (again, using tools that work for me). I don't want to spend a day setting up vscode and then realizing I can never edit as fast on it as vim what with the 300ms latency it adds to every keystroke
- distrill 5y agosounds good, good luck
- distrill 5y agoYeah, whenever I hear this kind of rhetoric - if my company ever required <some minor annoyance> it's time for a new job - I roll my eyes. Sure, keep pushing yourself out of more companies, there are a lot of good engineers* who will be absolutely as productive as you and who won't be a drain on everyone around them. *it's always engineers making these statements or I only know engineers
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- resters 5y agoThat's not a requirement. RTFA