Codespaces uses the same underlying technology as Visual Studio Codespaces to bring a fully GitHub-native experience to our GitHub users. We've been working with multiple teams on the Visual Studio side to make this happen (I work as the product lead on Codespaces)
Similarly Github Actions is reusing a lot of Azure Pipelines under the hood.
One of the most impressive parts about Microsoft's recent acquisitions is how quickly essentially two separate companies are now sharing code. It's hard enough to get different teams/products in the same company to use shared code in a meaningful way, and Microsoft has accomplished it with a new company.
Azure storage is definitely the black sheep. They cleaned up the VM/compute layer a few years ago with the introduction of Azure Resource Manager (ARM), but storage hasn't gotten that big an overhaul yet. And it shows. They seem to be slowly improving things under the hood though...
What's the issue with Azure Storage? It seems to me like it's one of the azure cloud services that are the least painful to use - at least through the official SDKs
For Github Actions, the product launch has been a major success and has become a new monetizable product. Anecdotally, I've heard of some companies moving their Jenkins/Circle CI/Travis CI workflows over to it, better proof is the sheer number of Github Actions that are now easy to install. This also allows Github to compete directly with Bitbucket and Bitbucket pipelines.
If your question is about who is asking for Github Codespaces, I'm not totally sure. Personally, for small changes it would be nice to be able to edit directly in Github but I certainly wouldn't pay for it. I imagine that core why behind this product release (besides the fact that most of this functionality was already pre-built and easy to reuse) is that it improves the user experience for anyone working from their chromeOS device, tablet and phone improving brand loyalty and capturing new users, especially students who may only have chromeOS devices.
As an OSS developer, Github actions make a lot of sense and is very welcome since it's very easy to setup (now! it was impossible in the beginning) and if you use bash scripts/npm scripts AND a tiny bit of workflow code then they are very agnostic as well.
I am unsure about this Github Codespaces though, I'll be testing it but I am fairly skeptical about invest a lot in Github-specific tooling beyond what is needed by a typical repo. It seems like Github has been trying to "extend" git into a proprietary phase for a while, and now with Microsoft backing it I'll wait to see if it's still the same old concept of locking you in deep and then do as they please. Not sure, it does look like they are going nice for now, but I personally prefer to wait.
This Codespaces doesn't solve a specific need I could point out like Actions did before, but maybe I'm just not their target.
I can imagine this being very useful in educational settings. Instead of students and teachers spending time on getting everyone's lab environments set up they just fork the course repository and tada it's there and it works.
For private repos, Codespaces will help on-boarding new team members or employees who don't have to waste time setting up a dev environment to contribute back.
I would love to have this stuff in theory but in practice, it hasn't worked for me.
I'm responsible for about 15 different Rails apps. These apps were built over the last 8 years and many have some nasty dependencies that make setting up a dev environment for them a pain. Or running tests a pain or whatever.
So many no one has touched in years but then some bug needs to be addressed in them. Today I have to get the app running again on my machine and there's always some silly timesink that makes the trivial change take too long.
For me ideally, I'd have two docker style images, one production, one test/development that just adds the dev resources to the production image. And then I could jump into any editor and see the changes live online without even installing docker on my machine.
Having a full dev system online means I can make changes from my phone, or really any internet connected device.
At this point, I don't have any interest in using such a system for my day to day work. But for my oddball stuff a well designed one would be great.
I can easily see at least one use: we have some outsourced dev work. It is painful to get them up and running because we have to set up remote desktop with everything that goes along with that, simply in order to let them edit code and run builds.
I imagine MS/GH will be selling to people like us the idea that we can simply make our GH repos the dev environments, and so all the access controls which we apply for managing interaction with the dev environment get us the appropriate dev environment for (effectively) free, and we throw out the desktop VMs.
Have you asked them? You can hit up pretty much anyone these days on Twitter and they'll respond, if the question is reasonable. You make it sound like someone owes you a response.
If this is about GitHub Actions specifically there is quite a bit of info at https://github.blog/2019-08-08-github-actions-now-supports-c.... My takeaway is that it's about packaging up Azure Pipelines in a way that GitHub users understand and complements other features. There are more jarring ways to integrate the products.
> You make it sound like someone owes you a response.
I didn't interpret the comment that way.
BTW, I'm not saying your interpretation is "not true" or "crazy" or anything like that. I just think it is better to keep this kind of (bad faith) interpretation private. I think it is useful to remember this HN guideline "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." [1]
The benefit, which is not spelled out there, is that if more of us do this, there will be fewer amplifications / chain-reactions of misinterpretations. This results in a more useful discussion.
For the love of God please make it work at least manageably in phones! Tall ask no doubt, but y'all seem capable of it. GitHub does everything right except getting the phone experience right!
I’ve used GitHub’s in browser editor to make minor changes to a PR from my phone while out at dinner. It was possible, but made me wish it was a little bit better.
I don’t think I would spend a day writing on my phone, but it’s really useful having this mobile.
I also use GitLab and their “web ide” (I think it’s called) is nice for changes by non-developers who don’t ever have a dev environment. We use a lot of config and docs repos that analysts use to update project material and they use the browser exclusively. I also approve merge requests from my phone almost daily to regenerate the static sites.
I'm gonna say you are in the minority there. Firstly, a Review should be just that a review of the code - not just a blind acceptance of a button. Its going to be hard to properly review code, which may be across multiple files, or may require switching within the same file, on a phone.
And secondly, work life balance, just because you can work while waiting in line for groceries doesn't mean you should
Firstly, I know my repo quite well and can generally (not always) tell whats happening with a PR without having to switch too many files. Even if I need to do that, I've been able to do that just fine on GitHubs desktop page so if it's not easy on a mobile now it's just a usability problem. It's a little bit much to say there's only one right way to do PRs or even write code.
Secondly, work life balance is a choice. Glad you make it, no one should ever be coerced against it, but I want to choose what I do. I'd rather look at my company code than what Kim Kardashians butt looks like on the Us weekly issue in the aisle. Also a bit presumptuous to assume it's only work, I have a personal website as well and I actually want to work on that whenever I have downtime.
My main usage of the app so far has been to approve PRs when pair/mob programming. Instead of going back to my desk where my computer is, I can approve the PR I've co-authored immediately.
Obviously it's quite a narrow use case, but I imagine there are lots of similar cases where the review is simple for one reason or the other and you want to get it done quickly.
Why would you need Codespaces for that? They released a standalone GitHub app recently just for this purpose. Not sure if it also works with the web version. But Codespaces seems to be the wrong tool for this job.
Their app is still outrageously feature incomplete in some ways. Can't create a branch! Can't edit files! Still better than their mobile site though but I end up opening their site in desktop mode to do any real work on my mobile. Super annoying!
Something I don’t yet understand about GitHub Codespaces is: can you execute a Dockerfile from it? Can you execute multiple ones? Can you execute docker-compose configurations?
Is it just an editor, or can it also spin an AWS (or Azure?) instance of the code you are writing?
I have seen people mention they can code from an iPad; but that’s not a complete workstation replacement unless it is easy to run your code.
I'm very excited about this! I hope you can host Codespaces in Australia as well so the latency is nice and fast! I tried VSO but I could only deploy to Singapore and it wasn't fast enough for me in Australia.
So I imagine this is similar to codesandbox.io which already lets you do frontendy bits?
I imagine the way Code spaces works is you spin up a container in azure with checked out GitHub branch, vscode on the browser then interfaces with the container(s).
Pretty neat idea if you can customize the docker container setup like a simple docker compose file or something.
Is the codespaces team hiring by any chance? I took a look at GitHub Jobs, and there are a few positions I could apply to there, but none directly related.
