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Comment by op03 | Hacker News Reader

All that is nice. But who are they building this for? Who is asking for this stuff?

For Github Actions, the product launch has been a major success and has become a new monetizable product. Anecdotally, I've heard of some companies moving their Jenkins/Circle CI/Travis CI workflows over to it, better proof is the sheer number of Github Actions that are now easy to install. This also allows Github to compete directly with Bitbucket and Bitbucket pipelines.

If your question is about who is asking for Github Codespaces, I'm not totally sure. Personally, for small changes it would be nice to be able to edit directly in Github but I certainly wouldn't pay for it. I imagine that core why behind this product release (besides the fact that most of this functionality was already pre-built and easy to reuse) is that it improves the user experience for anyone working from their chromeOS device, tablet and phone improving brand loyalty and capturing new users, especially students who may only have chromeOS devices.

As an OSS developer, Github actions make a lot of sense and is very welcome since it's very easy to setup (now! it was impossible in the beginning) and if you use bash scripts/npm scripts AND a tiny bit of workflow code then they are very agnostic as well.

I am unsure about this Github Codespaces though, I'll be testing it but I am fairly skeptical about invest a lot in Github-specific tooling beyond what is needed by a typical repo. It seems like Github has been trying to "extend" git into a proprietary phase for a while, and now with Microsoft backing it I'll wait to see if it's still the same old concept of locking you in deep and then do as they please. Not sure, it does look like they are going nice for now, but I personally prefer to wait.

This Codespaces doesn't solve a specific need I could point out like Actions did before, but maybe I'm just not their target.

I can imagine this being very useful in educational settings. Instead of students and teachers spending time on getting everyone's lab environments set up they just fork the course repository and tada it's there and it works.

For private repos, Codespaces will help on-boarding new team members or employees who don't have to waste time setting up a dev environment to contribute back.

I would love to have this stuff in theory but in practice, it hasn't worked for me.

I'm responsible for about 15 different Rails apps. These apps were built over the last 8 years and many have some nasty dependencies that make setting up a dev environment for them a pain. Or running tests a pain or whatever.

So many no one has touched in years but then some bug needs to be addressed in them. Today I have to get the app running again on my machine and there's always some silly timesink that makes the trivial change take too long.

For me ideally, I'd have two docker style images, one production, one test/development that just adds the dev resources to the production image. And then I could jump into any editor and see the changes live online without even installing docker on my machine.

Having a full dev system online means I can make changes from my phone, or really any internet connected device.

At this point, I don't have any interest in using such a system for my day to day work. But for my oddball stuff a well designed one would be great.

> For me ideally, I'd have two docker style images, one production, one test/development that just adds the dev resources to the production image.

Clarification question: do you mean two images in total?

Perhaps you are saying that would cover all 15 Rails apps?

I imagine a lot of projects will start here, whether it's new developers or existing developers who want to spin up a straightforward service.

I just used Glitch.com for the first time to set write and deploy a Node server in 10 minutes, and it was an incredible experience.

I've been looking for a better way to make changes to my personal projects from my Chromebook.

I can easily see at least one use: we have some outsourced dev work. It is painful to get them up and running because we have to set up remote desktop with everything that goes along with that, simply in order to let them edit code and run builds.

I imagine MS/GH will be selling to people like us the idea that we can simply make our GH repos the dev environments, and so all the access controls which we apply for managing interaction with the dev environment get us the appropriate dev environment for (effectively) free, and we throw out the desktop VMs.

So I suppose that you would like a faster horse?

When someone builds something and doesn't actually mention why, its not unreasonable to ask what the motivation was...

Have you asked them? You can hit up pretty much anyone these days on Twitter and they'll respond, if the question is reasonable. You make it sound like someone owes you a response.

If this is about GitHub Actions specifically there is quite a bit of info at https://github.blog/2019-08-08-github-actions-now-supports-c.... My takeaway is that it's about packaging up Azure Pipelines in a way that GitHub users understand and complements other features. There are more jarring ways to integrate the products.

> You make it sound like someone owes you a response.

I didn't interpret the comment that way.

BTW, I'm not saying your interpretation is "not true" or "crazy" or anything like that. I just think it is better to keep this kind of (bad faith) interpretation private. I think it is useful to remember this HN guideline "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." [1]

The benefit, which is not spelled out there, is that if more of us do this, there will be fewer amplifications / chain-reactions of misinterpretations. This results in a more useful discussion.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think that's a fair point.

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