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Now, you have to remember, this is one of our best engineers, principal level. Kind of a best-case scenario, so to speak. Kevin said he's losing ten hours a month on basically like lost productivity time. So at a GitHub scale you can start to do the math there. Assume -- again, that's best case. We have a thousand engi... |
So it's not just like "Oh, we lost this much productivity time." Really, the loss is "What did we not build in those moments? What did we not get accomplished in those moments?" And I think Codespaces removes that class of issues again, and keeps us focused on creating value. To me, that's so refreshing. That's what I ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[08:21\] Why do you think now is the time for Codespaces, or just in-the-cloud development? |
**Cory Wilkerson:** Yeah, I think all the raw ingredients are now there. The raw ingredients aren't just like tech. Some of that is just how the industry thinks. Containers have been on a tear now for years; containers are kind of everywhere. You see maturity across the industry with respect to container-based workflow... |
I've been in the industry for a while, and maybe a decade ago you were like "Oh, I would never move that thing out to the cloud. That's gonna run on my precious racked hardware here in this closet." That mentality is effectively gone. We're moving more and more precious workloads to the cloud on a daily basis. There's ... |
And then of course, VS Code out there is obviously another key part of this. It's like this super-powerful thing... And we look at the idea that containers are everywhere, we have VS Code, this really powerful tool that we work closely with, and we've got the fact that the industry now has broadly adopted, exclusively ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's interesting you mention that too, because I was thinking about the timeline, and just the perfect -- I'm not sure if this is the best way to say it, but the perfect storm, really. You've got the trajectory of Microsoft supporting open source and Linux. I'm not sure which came first, if it was L... |
**Cory Wilkerson:** Yeah. I mean, VS Code is just a powerhouse right now. It wins business because it's an incredibly powerful tool. And that's what we're focused on with Codespaces. And like you see with VS Code... You just wanna build kind of best-in-class product experiences. Then the users will follow. People are l... |
**Jerod Santo:** You said something interesting about the preciousness of our development environments... And I'm with you that we've commoditized the servers, but we definitely have not commoditized dev, because it's so intricate, it's so set up... Sometimes it's like "There be dragons. Please don't touch my laptop, b... |
\[11:59\] We talk about our setup - we have probably tens of thousands of lines of code, and very few dependencies in our stack, but GitHub is 14 years old, and there's a million plus commits, and I'm sure the dependency list is very long... What kind of effort was this? Tell us the story of bringing it along. |
**Cory Wilkerson:** It is. These are all very, very true points. You know, the last thing I wanted to do was kind of be the vessel that went out to GitHub and said "I wanna change your development environment", because these things are so precious. Like, I'm an engineer, too. I think my environment is very much preciou... |
And I started off on this journey as a skeptic. I think I shared some of this, too... I didn't think this would be a fruitful journey necessarily. I was just gonna go do my level best as an employee, see if I could make it happen, build moment etc. and see if I could find something out there. Now, on the other side of ... |
But going back to the core of the story, it was literally just me out there, calling on my friends to begin with, inside of GitHub. I'd been there for five years, and the first few years were just me tapping into relationships, saying "Hey, can you give this thing a shot? Can you try this out? I wanna get your feedback... |
So I'd go out and ask favors of friends, and just be like "Can you try this out and give me some feedback?" And generally, the feedback I would get back was -- first it was resistance, like "Why would I do this? It's productivity lost; tax on productivity. I don't trust HTTP. There's gonna be lag", that kind of feedbac... |
At the same time, as I hacked in this space too, I was starting to get some of that "Well, there's something here." The big a-ha moment for me was connecting VS Code into my Codespace out in the cloud and still retaining that local development experience. So it felt to me like it was still very local. The magic is the ... |
But that aside, it started with just a very small number of users. So we would go back to leadership in GitHub and talk about progress we were making... And the early days, the story was "I have five people that have responded positively to Codespaces." So not much of a story, but starting to kind of make a little bit ... |
Then, the next iteration on this was like "Well, let's go find a team. Let's get a full team on Codespaces. How can we get a single team - 6 to 8 people - committed to using Codespaces, and stick in this thing?" At this point we'd had this other effort running on the side to get GitHub/GitHub, the core github.com repos... |
\[15:59\] But I think the real breakthrough moment came when we stopped calling this dogfooding. You hear this term all the time, dogfood... I think it actually originated -- I looked up on Wikipedia; I think the term originated inside of Microsoft a number of years ago. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that right? |
**Cory Wilkerson:** But GitHubbers, my colleagues don't respond well to that term. Dogfooding doesn't inspire anyone to go do anything. Just like "Eat the dogfood? Who feels good about that?" And so what we did was we launched what we called the GitHub Computer Club, and I would love to dedicate a full episode on this.... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I love that. |
**Cory Wilkerson:** We made a bunch of noise about it... Yeah, people loved it. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's so cool. |
**Cory Wilkerson:** People straight up were just like, "This is great. Let me in. I want a membership card." And in doing so -- we had to give them something in return. So they would join the computer club, but we offered to our "exclusive" members what we call the concierge team. And this team was built to kind of sup... |
So the second these people had friction - you know, one of the requirements of entering the computer club was that you had to kind of raise your hand. You couldn't disappear and go back to local desktop. You had to virtually raise your hand and say "I'm about to opt out of this, because Codespaces can't keep my busines... |
We continued to play that model back and forth between Computer Club and concierge team, until we had built the product and built enough momentum inside of GitHub that one day we kind of looked around and we were like "Wow, we have hundreds of people developing github.com and GitHub Codespaces." And I think the real st... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, I hate to break it to you, Cory, but GCC is already taken as an acronym, so... You've got a namespace conflict on that one. |
**Cory Wilkerson:** Yeah... Well, maybe the Codespaces Computer Club, so we can go with GCCC. |
**Jerod Santo:** There you go. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** All the C's. I like this aspect because you treat this like a customer scenario. You built a product, and you have to retain customers. And you're actually exercising a great principle for anybody building a product, which is "Talk to your users." And when they have trouble - swoop in, as you had sa... |
As you had said, you wanted to go along with your employee card and be able to see if Codespaces could work, and out the other end you became a believer. But you're not forcing GitHub engineers to use it, you're asking them to try it. In this case, the Computer Club, with the oath... And then as you said, you look up a... |
**Cory Wilkerson:** I think that's right. The position was -- no Fiat. We didn't wanna lead with "You have to do this." That's the absolute wrong way to get adoption in your product. We wanted to literally win the business of our colleagues. We wanted to build such a fantastic experience in Codespaces that people would... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You've gotta use some emotion in there. You've gotta put some emotion in there. |
**Cory Wilkerson:** Yeah, exactly. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[19:59\] You have to get them excited. |
**Cory Wilkerson:** It had to have a soul. It needed some soul behind it, that was the idea. And the fact that we did respond to this -- we actually did win business. When things didn't go well and when people wanted to opt out, they could, and they would, for a week, or whatever... But the goal was "How do we get them... |
**Jerod Santo:** So what happens if you take the oath and you go back? Do you chop off a finger, or what's the penalty? \[laughs\] |
**Cory Wilkerson:** Well, you know, we leave that intentionally vague, so people can assume the worst. No, I don't know that we've had any real regression there just yet, which is good. Codespaces is super-retentive. I think we have people from time to time use local desktop. We have a colleague -- this is actually in ... |
We talked about it, again, in the blog post - you click a button and the environment is live. So for every new engineers that joins GitHub, I think they all are probably fairly spoiled at this point, because day one they click a button and they're able to run that entire github.com environment. It's just been really in... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So Cory, the way you've explained the flow of this GitHub Computer Club seems a little smooth. I've gotta imagine you hit some friction. Can you share some of the struggle that you hit? Some opposing forces in the process of rolling this out. |
**Cory Wilkerson:** Yeah. Basically, it started with a bunch of "No" throughout GitHub. I think people had seen previous iterations of Codespaces... We announced it, I think, in May of 2020, at GitHub Satellite. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. The first tweet I saw about it was Kelsey Hightower's, actually. |
**Cory Wilkerson:** Okay, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So that's May 2020. |
**Cory Wilkerson:** It's been out there for a while... And I think when people first try to use it inside of GitHub, there was a bit of friction. It didn't work for them, and I think first impressions can sometimes be lasting impressions. So when I went out there, I'm just like "Use this thing. It's great. It's really ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** "Don't touch my local dev environment, Cory." |
**Cory Wilkerson:** Yeah. And we'll get to this in a second - one of the great parts about Codespaces is that we just commoditized the compute part of this. The environment is now running somewhere else. But dotfiles, VS Code setting sync, VS Code extensions - we bring those all to the environment. So you don't lose yo... |
\[23:54\] I digress... Going back to building the business a little bit - it felt like startup tactics. So we had the concierge team, we had the Computer Club... We had effectively guerilla marketing. We were out on Slack every day, looking for opportunities to say "Have you tried Codespaces?" People were receiving M1 ... |
We did pairing sessions... So we were up in front of everyone all the time, saying "If you wanna get started, here we are. We're gonna hold your hand through this and show you the ropes, show you how we're doing." Kind of social proof, I think, which is really valuable there. All hands -- we'd get in front of the entir... |
We connected with the right people... I maybe loathe to call them influencers, but the people inside of GitHub that every engineer look up to. They look up to them and say like "This is the person that I aspire to be at some point." We converted them. We want their business. They're kind of like trendsetters and tastem... |
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