> why?

Pull up a chair for a moment and consider that in this moment of time you are an open-source maintainer or a team-lead who has to review the pull-requests in the video below. Each browser tab is a brand new development environment, the git branch is automatically cloned, all dependencies are restored and your software has already been compiled.

Good? Now you understand what Gitpod is all about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7BINiu_Rbo

What is the benefit over pulling an image or container though?

Clarification edit: cost/risk vs reward weighted is what I meant

It just works and attacks such as https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/au/security/news/cybercrime... are greatly mitigated :-)

It "just works" with no local setup.

What if you weigh that against the cost and, perhaps more importantly, the risk of laying dead in the water due to third party service outages?

The moment these have an outage, you just switch back to the old way of doing it - on your local machine.

Which would mean you get the risk and cost of using this service in addition to overhead of keeping your old environment up-to-date as well.

If Gitpod (!) or GitHub Codespaces is down (!) then if your team has successfully migrated towards reproducible environments then mitigation in disaster scenarios should be as simple as

> $ nix-shell

ie. https://github.com/gitpod-io/template-nix

or

> $ docker-compose up

ie. https://github.com/gitpod-io/template-docker-compose

ps. Did you know Gitpod is open-source and can be self-hosted on your own infrastructure?

So if our workspace environments are fully reproducible and trivial to deploy already, what additional benefits do these services bring to the table? (circling back to my original question :) )

Been using internally-managed reproducible environments for a while now, so I'm fully aware of the major benefits.

Will have to look into Gitpod more, thanks!

Context switching https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28431406 and software development in the cloud means you don't need fast internet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26284635 and a companies intellectual property is not on employee/contractor devices.

The code is still in git and on GitHub, the workspace is ephemeral. You can always clone the repo and work locally. I think the idea isn't to 100% replace all local workflows necessarily but to supplement them and to enable working in situations where you don't have access to a developer workstation otherwise.

Of course if you roll this out to the entire company to replace regular workstations, you probably want something with an SLA. Not sure what Gitpod's answer is, but Microsoft seems to sell Codespaces outside GitHub via Azure and there's probably a story for the enterprise version addressing this need.

Definitely valid points.

I don't see a way of committing to use this service without also maintaining the capability required to operate as you are now on a moments notice. The SLAs won't be cheap either I imagine.

Don't get me wrong though, I think it's a cool service and I can see it going places. It just seems impossible to justify for small to medium sized shops, especially considering you can get the exact same benefits from containers and images right now (and even run your own centralised VSCode server).

It’s great to be able to bang out some code on a tablet or a Chromebook without Linux access.

Being able to resume from anywhere without thinking twice and having to checkpoint the code is also great. Off-loading compilation and editing to the cloud is the future of programming and already done at scale at large companies like google.

So our computers are getting more powerful every day for nothing but Electron?

My laptop definitely doesn’t have server grade hardware in it and the battery grinds to a halt when compiling larger projects.

Computers are getting more powerful every day and _how we use them is changing_.

https://ghuntley.com/the-office/

> What happens if you get in a van accident and that results in you becoming homeless once again? <https://ghuntley.com/how-long>

This link gives a 404.

I'm not a user, but I have experience with one use-case where I'd imagine they're very useful:

When maintaining an open source project, there's often a little bit of tension between making the development experience more productive for you, the maintainer, and more convenient for new contributors. Using a more complex toolchain might make things nicer for you as someone who works in the codebase every day, but adds overhead to anyone who just wants to make a single contribution related to their own work. I could imagine having a "click here to develop" option would help ease that tension.

Here are some reasons that motivated github devs for example https://github.blog/2021-08-11-githubs-engineering-team-move...