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Comment by JackFr | Hacker News Reader

I see very little value here. The first angle tries to sell this as a productivity gain, but the fact that new hires will not be able to start committing code for 1-2 days is hardly killing companies. Additionally, the initial setup is a onetime cost which will be amortized over the life of the employee. Locking into a proprietary ecosystem -- that's the gift that keeps on giving.

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I agree, and I can't help imagine that there isn't some overselling of the "seriousness" of the onboarding problem to (probably) non-engineering VCs.

That said, I can see enormous potential in this as an education platform. Having trouble with you CS homework? Open up Nitrous and get someone far away to help you out.

I've been using Nitrous.io to teach an intro to python class for non-programmers (librarians, management, other "Information Professionals"). It's fantastic to be able to get everyone on the same page and same development environment from day 1.

The collaboration feature is still too rough to be useful for a novice level class. Also it gives full access to the collab box with exactly the same permissions as the box owner. If they add some features and some tools for gating access and user privileges it will be useful for my class.

Agree 100%. I teach a Programming for Non Programmers class using Sinatra. Typically I'll have all 24 people setup with a "Hello World" app in about 30 minutes.

Even with 2 TAs, I can't even imagine the alternative of trying to get an entire class of programming newbies running ruby locally across Mac and Windows without any problems or leaving anyone behind. It's easy as a developer to underestimate the difficulty of getting things set up. Even in nitrous the most common problem I have to debug during class is people not being in the right directory because they have to use 'cd workspace' before they can 'ruby helloworld.rb'. There's just a giant set of knowledge that we developers rely on to even do the simplest of tasks, and nitrous lets me skip over all that boring stuff and get right to the interesting concepts they can see on their screen like paths, params, request handlers, views and links.

My only complaint is the onboarding UX uses some confusing wording/concepts for beginners like "boxes" and "hostnames" and energy credits. I just handhold everyone through that part so it must be really difficult for someone trying to load it up themselves. When I found some bugs I had the chance to talk with the guys behind nitrous and they were really helpful with trying to figure out what went wrong and how they can simplify the flow, so hopefully we'll see some improvements there with the new round of funding.

https://cloud.sagemath.com is similar, but aimed at higher education (especially mathematics). I've spent most of my time implementing this during the last year, and many people are using it in conjunction with classes. Saving the time of setting up a uniform development environment, and making collaboration easy, seems to be pretty important for students in classes.

That's certainly true for staff that works on a given codebase full-time. However, there are a lot (I saw an estimate of something like 40%) of developers who are part-time, at least to one of their relevant projects. Think also of other people who work on software projects: designers, doc, etc.

Also keep in mind that many/most larger organizations don't have a single codebase, so this doesn't apply just to new hires. Everybody at a large organization would by definition be new on most of their code projects.

If a developer is going to work on a project for only two weeks, you're basically throwing away 20% of their time. Alternatively, you don't assign people to short-term projects where they might be able to add value because of the overhead.

Worth noting also: Nitrous works with any local editor and deploys to whatever, so I'm not really sure how there's lock-in.

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