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A comment on Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineer... by darzu on Saturday February 08, 2020 @03:31PM (#22278138)
My dream is a "Open in VSCode" button on each GitHub repo that would create a container dev environment (either locally or hosted), and that environment would be ready to run all test, CI, localhost etc.

You could trivially create a new environment to test out someones PR or work on a feature branch, etc. If you use hosted environments, then you could connect from any client. If you only have a web browser, then you could work from VSCode in the browser (it's all JS+HTML anyway).

Others could join your hosted environment for peer-programming Google Docs style.

On hosted environments, normally long builds could be done very quickly and smart caching on the backend could share incremental compilation state between your teammates and you.

We're pretty close to this already with VSCode Remote Containers[0], Visual Studio Online[1] and VSCode Live Share[2].

(Disclosure: I work at MSFT but not on these technologies.)

[0] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/containers

[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/vsonline

[2] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/live-share/

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Re:Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineer... by amasad on Saturday February 08, 2020 @03:45PM (#22278220)
We've made something similar at Repl.it -- we call it "Repl from Repo". It's far from running everything but it can run a lot: https://repl.it/blog/github

We tried to make it as seamless and as low configuration as possible. Our "run on repl.it" badge is currently growing exponentially on GitHub.

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Re:Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineer... by ijpsud on Saturday February 08, 2020 @04:03PM (#22278329)
Great work on this. Is it open source? Or is there a way to use my own hardware? If not, then it seems like gitpod.io[0] is a much better fit for the open source ecosystem. That said, there's definitely a place for proprietary software in this space (I'm a Glitch user and I love it).

[0] https://www.gitpod.io/

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Re:Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineer... by amasad on Saturday February 08, 2020 @04:10PM (#22278372)
Much of the component pieces are open-source, as I mention in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22278301

And the goal is to get to open-source most, if not all of it.

Is GitPod fully open-source? AFAICT you still need to buy a license to self-host.

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Re:Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineer... by lobo42 on Monday February 10, 2020 @05:17AM (#22287830)
Gitpod is open-source at core. I.e. we made the IDE completely open-source (https://theia-ide.org). I didn't know replit is open-source. Can you share a pointer?
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Re:Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineer... by gavinray on Saturday February 08, 2020 @03:39PM (#22278187)
What you are talking about exists, and its fantastic:

https://www.gitpod.io/

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