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• GitHub's engineering team of 600+ engineers moving to Codespaces |
• Removing productivity issues related to development environment complexity |
• Lower barrier to entry and increased accessibility to projects with Codespaces |
• Saving time and reducing lost productivity due to environment breakage issues |
• Focusing on value creation and impact with reduced environment complexity |
• The current industry conditions, including container maturity and cloud adoption, make now the right time for in-the-cloud development |
• Development environments moving to the cloud |
• VS Code as a powerful tool for development |
• Codespaces as a cloud-based development environment |
• Preciousness of development environments and resistance to change |
• Bringing Codespaces to GitHub and overcoming initial resistance |
• Breaking through with a team using Codespaces on GitHub core |
• Changing terminology from "dogfooding" to a more appealing concept |
• The GitHub Computer Club is a concept where employees take an oath to use Codespaces exclusively |
• The club was created to increase adoption and retention of Codespaces within GitHub |
• A concierge team was established to provide support and address friction points for members |
• The club and concierge team played a key role in building momentum and driving adoption of Codespaces |
• Codespaces has become a powerful tool within GitHub, with hundreds of employees using it to develop and deploy projects |
• The Computer Club and concierge team are examples of how GitHub approaches product development and adoption, focusing on user experience and satisfaction |
• Despite initial friction and resistance from employees, Codespaces has become a widely adopted tool within GitHub |
• The Computer Club has become a symbol of commitment and dedication to using Codespaces, with members even requesting merchandise such as satin and denim jackets |
• Codespaces development environment in the cloud |
• Preserving users' curated workbench and preferences |
• Early adoption and guerilla marketing efforts |
• Building hype and social proof with demos and partnerships |
• Ruthless prioritization and iterative improvements |
• Nat's high bar and journey from skepticism to enthusiasm |
• Technical improvements, including shallow cloning and caching |
• Pre-built Codespaces for faster provisioning |
• Pre-builds for Codespaces are currently in beta, with the goal of making them widely available soon |
• Codespaces aims to provide fast and reliable IDE experience, with ongoing investment in speed and performance |
• GitHub's story with Codespaces is focused on large enterprises, but the platform is designed to be accessible to small teams and individual developers |
• Codespaces has features such as community-powered repositories and default images for common frameworks, making it easy to get started without requiring Docker expertise |
• The platform is transitioning from a macOS-centric to a Linux-based environment, with a goal of sunsetting macOS development in September |
• Codespaces allows developers to use their local IDE, such as VS Code, while still leveraging cloud-based compute resources |
• As organizations adopt Codespaces, they will need to consider which repositories to support, but a single flagship repository can serve as a reference point for others. |
• GitHub's .dev feature provides a multi-file editing experience in the browser, allowing users to edit code without leaving GitHub. |
• The feature is similar to Codespaces, but without compute or a terminal, making it a more read-only experience. |
• The goal of .dev is to provide an on-ramp to comfortability with Codespaces and to transition users from a read-only environment to a more interactive one. |
• The feature is primarily intended for reading and browsing code, but will eventually fold into a comprehensive Codespaces experience. |
• GitHub is encouraging users to adopt Codespaces and providing a seamless transition from .dev to Codespaces. |
• The .dev feature is being used as a developer-first approach, providing a better editing experience and increasing productivity. |
• Discussion of GitHub's .dev and Codespaces features, including their integration with VS Code and extension support |
• Explanation of how GitHub's Dotfiles repository and Setting Sync work |
• Details on how browser storage is used for syncing extensions and settings across GitHub environments |
• Impact of Codespaces on developer productivity and contributions to OSS |
• Discussion of potential second-order effects of widespread adoption of Codespaces |
• Explanation of how test data is generated and managed in Codespaces environments |
• The concept of infinite branches at once, versus a single branch, and its implications for development |
• The use of pre-builds to speed up development, and the ability to codify processes like database backup and restoration into GitHub Actions or lifecycle events |
• The idea of a task-centric model for development, and how it differs from traditional single-branch models |
• The potential for Codespaces to become the standard for development environments in the next 5 years, with a majority of developers preferring cloud-based environments over local development |
• The need for reliability and investment in infrastructure to support large-scale adoption of Codespaces |
• The concept of "dial tones" - always-on, constantly available infrastructure. |
• GitHub uses a local image of the Codespaces environment for fallback in case of an outage or offline work |
• VS Code is the primary client for Codespaces, but GitHub is working to support other editors like Vim and Emacs |
• The idea of a language server protocol could enable other editors to be Codespaces-aware |
• GitHub's goal is to support multiple clients and provide a heterogeneous experience for developers |
• The VS Code team is highly regarded for their commitment to developers, but there are concerns about the long-term maintainability and potential lock-in |
• Discussion of a new show or project called "Ship It" |
• Connection between "Ship It" and the process of taking an application to production |
• Exploring the idea of coding in a cloud setup |
• Interest in moving forward with the project and making it happen |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Cory, welcome to The Changelog. We've been looking forward to this conversation. We've been paying close attention to Codespaces, we've been paying close attention to, I suppose, the right timing for devs to truly consider what coding in the cloud can do for them, and when would be the right time to... |
**Cory Wilkerson:** Thank you very much, happy to be here. Thank you for having us, and your interest in Codespaces. |
**Jerod Santo:** So the big news is that GitHub's engineering team, all 600(ish) have moved to Codespaces. Maybe we just start right there, and you can tell us that story. |
**Cory Wilkerson:** Sure, yeah. There's all kinds of places to start, but I think the net of it is - if you look over the past 30 days right now we have 600 GitHub engineers active in Codespaces, which I think is just a really interesting and compelling story. |
We were just talking before the show a little bit... I started off as a bit of a skeptic in this space. I was kind of roped into the effort and asked to help move from what was effectively kind of no adoption, into a real commitment to Codespaces... And that turned out to be a heck of a journey, and where my story in C... |
What would be most interesting to explore there? Do you wanna know ground zero, what it looked like from day one, and how we built momentum there? What all would you like to dig into there? |
**Jerod Santo:** I like the Why's. Why are we doing this? Why did GitHub decide to do this, and then how did you get involved? |
**Cory Wilkerson:** Yeah, I think the Why here is basically we saw an opportunity to remove an entire class of productivity issues that I think we've all experienced as engineers. I've been doing this for 20-25 years; y'all have been in the industry for some time... And a near constant is this friction you feel over de... |
And GitHub is around a thousand engineers, so you can imagine that winning back productivity for us gets very valuable very quickly, at the scale of a thousand engineers. We're not a huge shop, we're still relatively small, but still, developer downtime costs a lot, and I think we saw here that we could bring this tech... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Does that also speak to the lower barrier to entry, in terms of class of issues? |
**Cory Wilkerson:** \[04:10\] Yeah, without a doubt. I think about -- one big benefit of Codespaces is just accessibility into projects now. The idea is that the environment kind of ships with the project. For some time -- for my entire career you would have to bend your environment to the will of the project, your loc... |
Now the idea is like "Hey, the environment is kind of attached to the project. It's part of the repository." We capture the environment and configuration. You click a button. We launch that compute for you out in the cloud; you attach your development environment and you're up and running. That class of problems is now... |
So one, it solves friction, two, it makes things far more accessible... And I'll say - personally, I'm kind of a top-down learner, and not bottom-up. I think many people are kind of top-down. In a new application that's unfamiliar to me, I like to start to tinker in it a little bit; change a thing here, refresh, see wh... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, Adam, you can speak to friction when it comes to development, right? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** Because, Adam, you hack on our codebase just infrequently enough that every time you work on it, I think, you hit friction. Don't you? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. If I accidentally Homebrew-upgrade or something like that, and you know, I'll upgrade Postgres, or something will happen to my database... You know, I've learned enough now to navigate our setup scripts better, but as Jerod said, it's only infrequently that I'm not always on the up and up, and... |
So when I spoke to barriers of entry, that's what it is - you have to learn so much ceremony, which over time as being a developer you will learn these things... But on day one, if you can remove that friction... And this is 1) a ton of time-savings for existing engineers, existing teams etc. but then also removing tha... |
**Cory Wilkerson:** Yeah, I can play on that a little bit. I was speaking to a principal engineer inside of GitHub yesterday... He's been here for almost a decade; he's just an excellent -- you know, at some point he's going to turn into an Octocat. He knows GitHub through and through. And I asked him, I was like "How ... |
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