Ask HN: Do you used a cloud based dev environment?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982879

by asdev • 5 months ago

2 1 5 months ago

news.ycombinator.com

At multiple companies I've worked for, we've always had a janky local set up. It's always near impossible to set up local dev and we've had an entire developer tools team supporting the hacky in house tool. Wondering if anyone uses purely cloud based or third party hosted dev environments and how the experience is?

plasma• 5 months ago

Yes, moved to GitHub Codespaces and generally has been good.

Pros: one click setup for devs jumping between projects after you get the devcontainer setup process working, takes some fiddling, trial and error.

Has felt good for some older projects to be wrapped in the devcontainer and once it’s working feel comfortable the environment is stable, and also moving everyone to new environments has been easy.

Keeping a haywire dev/npm script away from your main machine is also good, but I know it’s not foolproof.

Cons: Codespaces CPUs are usual cloud slow so you need to pay more and single threaded perf won’t be as good as your laptop, a real shame. I think GitHub competitors would have better CPUs.

Very rarely but Codespaces can have a technical issue and you can't do your work (inaccessible), and to avoid it sleeping during the day due to inactivity you may leave it running most of the day but it demands a shutdown after 12 hours or so, so very long dev sessions can be interrupted.

GitHub also dropped support for using JetBrains IDEs which was not cool, so it’s just vscode which is usable but would have preferred other IDEs.

If Codespaces team is reading would love to see some improvements here.

Ask HN: Do you used a cloud based dev environment?

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