This week we’re joined by Brigit Murtaugh, Product Manager on the Visual Studio Code team at Microsoft, and we’re talking about Development Containers and the Dev Container spec. Ever since we talked with Cory Wilkerson about Coding in the cloud with Codespaces we’ve wanted to get the Changelog.com codebase setup with a dev environment in the cloud to more easily support contributions. After getting a drive-by contribution from Chris Eggert to add a Dev Container spec to our codebase, we got curious and reached out to Brigit and asked her to come on the show to give us all the details.

On this special edition of The Changelog, we’re talking with Cory Wilkerson, Senior Director of Engineering at GitHub, about GitHub Codespaces. For years now, the possibility of coding in the cloud seemed so close, yet so far away for a number of reasons. According to Cory, the raw ingredients to make coding in the cloud a reality have been there for years. The challenge has really been how the industry thinks, and we are now at a place where the skepticism in cloud based workflows is “non-existent.”

After 15 months in preview, GitHub not only announced the availability of Codespaces for Teams and Enterprise — they also showcased their internal adoption, with 600 of their 1,000 engineers using it daily to develop GitHub.com.

On this episode, Cory shares the full backstory of that journey and a peek into the future where we’re all coding in the cloud.

The incomparable Jessica Kerr drops by with a grab-bag of amazing topics. Understanding software systems, transferring knowledge between devs, building relationships, using VS Code & Docker to code together, observability as a logical extension of TDD, and a whole lot more.

In this episode we talk with Ramya Rao about code editors and language servers. We share our thoughts on which editor we use, why we use it, and why we’d switch. We also discuss what a language server is and why it matters in connecting editors and the languages they support. We also dive into various ways to be effective with VS Code including shortcuts, plugins, and more.