The GitHub Codespaces Story [Cory Wilkerson]

<p>Listen to the Changelog: <a href="https://changelog.com/podcast/459">https://changelog.com/podcast/459</a> (15mins in)</p><p><strong>Transcript</strong></p><p>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, because it works right now, but I’m not sure if it’s gonna work tomorrow.” I do hate that. I think it’s almost a different skillset, of maintaining that. There’s overlap between development and the maintenance of a development environment in terms of things that you need to learn… But it’s almost a different task altogether. So I don’t like that about it, but it’s still very true that our development environments are precious to us, and they’re tweaked, and configured, and customized, and all the things. So I’m sure there’s probably lots of resistance to this…</p><p>[<a href="https://changelog.com/podcast/459#t=00:11:59.29"><strong>00:11:59.29</strong></a>] 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.</p><p><a href="https://changelog.com/podcast/459#transcript-18"><strong>CORY WILKERSON</strong></a></p><p>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 precious. And here I was, kind of the face in GitHub of saying “Well, we think we have a better way. Come join us over here.”</p><p>And I started off on this journey as a skeptic. I think I shared some of this, too