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Discussion on: What makes a great development environment?

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mikenikles profile image
Mike

I recently wrote a blog post about that.

tl;dr: Consistency, web-based, and tracking environment changes in source control.

mikenikles.com/blog/my-cloud-based...

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leob profile image
leob • Edited

I've read it, that's extremely interesting! That's really the first time I've read a serious account of a developer who has completely switched to a 100% could native dev env, I wouldn't even have thought it would be possible already at this moment.

(I think it makes a big difference that you're using a Chromebook, not because it would otherwise not be possible but because with a Chromebook you're already in a "cloud native" mindset)

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mikenikles profile image
Mike

Thanks for the feedback. You are right, as a Chromebook user I already had my mindset in the cloud and the development environment was the last piece I still ran "offline".

A related article I wrote for InfoQ, with more details on how to get started, is at infoq.com/articles/cloud-based-dev... in case you want to dive a bit deeper into the "how?".

Also worth noting is GitHub Codespaces at github.com/features/codespaces/. It's a similar approach, but based on VS Code rather than the open-source Theia editor used by Gitpod.

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leob profile image
leob

Wow! So even Github is joining this movement. What probably makes this a lot easier is that VS Code is in fact already to a large extent a web app (based on node.js and Electron), so they would "just" need to remove the Electron wrapper and turn it into a PWA or webapp and there you go.

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mikenikles profile image
Mike

It was apparently in their minds from the get go according to mobile.twitter.com/davidfowl/statu...

Gitpod on the other hand is a lot more open and also supports GitLab and soon Bitbucket. It'll be interesting to see this space evolve over time.

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leob profile image
leob

Absolutely, this could be "the next big thing" ...