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Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #529

You’re just a devcontainer.json away

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.

Justin Searls Test Double

The Standard Ruby VS Code extension

Recent guest Justin Searls announces his new thing:

Standard Ruby (a Ruby style guide with linter & automatic code fixer) now ships with its own built-in language server, which enables it to offer lightning-fast linting and formatting for supported editors. This new extension leverages that language server to deliver a much faster UX than most other Ruby extensions available for VS Code.

I don’t know how many of our readers live at the intersection of VS Code and Ruby… but if you do, this should be great news for you. 😉

VS Code vscodium.com

VSCodium – open source binaries of VS Code

Did you know VS Code has a proprietary license?

Microsoft’s vscode source code is open source (MIT-licensed), but the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this not-FLOSS license and contains telemetry/tracking.

The VSCodium project exists so that you don’t have to download+build from source. This project includes special build scripts that clone Microsoft’s vscode repo, run the build commands, and upload the resulting binaries for you to GitHub releases. These binaries are licensed under the MIT license. Telemetry is disabled.

They also have various package managers covered, so you can brew install --cask vscodium, etc.

VS Code blog.dendron.so

VS Code's major Markdown tooling upgrade

Lots of cool stuff for Markdown authors in April’s VS Code release. Namely:

  • drag and drop files into the editor to create a Markdown link
  • find all references to header|links|files|urls inside of Markdown
  • rename headers|links inside Markdown (and propagate the changes)
  • rename Markdown files (and propagate to all references)

The Dendron team is excited because their primary vault hosts over 400k lines of Markdown 🤯

VS Code, and IDEs more broadly, help developers manage large code bases by making available tools to leverage and manipulate the syntax of programming languages. By shifting some of this tooling to markdown, can we do the same for large Markdown repositories?

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #459

Coding in the cloud with Codespaces

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.

Alex Ellis blog.alexellis.io

The Internet is my computer

In 1984 John Gage of Sun Microsystems was credited as saying “The Network is the computer.” Almost four decades ago, John had a vision of distributed systems working together to be greater than the sum of their parts.

For this article, I surveyed the land of hosted IDEs and it turns out that we’ve progressed beyond running VS Code on an iPad whilst sipping a cocktail.

You can still do that, but there’s way more to it today and I’ll take you through some of use-cases and add my own thoughts. There’s also a practical guide at the end to get started with the open source VS Code browser by Coder.

VS Code wiki.dendron.so

A local-first, markdown-based note taking tool for VS Code

whereas most tools (try to make it) easy to get notes in, they tend to make it hard to get them back out later, and it only gets worse as you add more notes. Dendron helps you get notes back out and works better the more notes you have.

There are a zillion and one note taking apps out there, but I like how Dendron positions itself here. I’ve never had a note-taking system that I stuck with, mostly because I rarely go back and find things in my notes that are useful. Most of that’s on me, but I wonder if some of it is on my tools not making retrieval a priority…

A local-first, markdown-based note taking tool for VS Code

Geoff Stevens software.com

Discover your most productive music for coding

Music Time brings the power of the Spotify player to your code editor. Control your music, view and create playlists, favorite and repeat songs, and discover new music without context switching to the Spotify web or desktop app.

Music Time is free and works with VS Code, Atom, and JetBrains IDEs. Some of its features require Spotify premium, but the personalized song recommendations work with the free version of Spotify as well. It even has a cool vizualizer so you can see your most productive songs.

Discover your most productive music for coding

Kubernetes github.com

Fully-baked, collaborative development environments in your browser

Tightly integrated with GitLab, GitHub, and Bitbucket, Gitpod automatically and continuously prebuilds dev environments for all your branches. As a result, team members can instantly start coding with fresh, ephemeral and fully-compiled dev environments - no matter if you are building a new feature, want to fix a bug or do a code review.

There’s a SaaS offering that’s free for open source or you can self-host it if you prefer.

Fully-baked, collaborative development environments in your browser

iOS brownfield.dev

Building real applications from my iPad

Michel Terhar:

In the search for a comfy and portable developer experience, I’ve made a lot of compromises in the past. The experience has gotten significantly better recently thanks to VS Code and Kubernetes. This workflow also does a good job for underpowered laptops or when working with lots of different and conflicting versions of python or ruby.

This is a solid, balanced piece that doesn’t overly sell the workflow and walks you through setting it up for yourself.

VS Code github.com

VSCodium — VS Code sans Microsoft branding/telemetry/licensing

According to the “why does this exist” section of the readme:

Microsoft’s downloads of Visual Studio Code are licensed under this not-FLOSS license and contain telemetry/tracking. According to this comment from a Visual Studio Code maintainer:

When we [Microsoft] build Visual Studio Code, we do exactly this. We clone the vscode repository, we lay down a customized product.json that has Microsoft specific functionality (telemetry, gallery, logo, etc.), and then produce a build that we release under our license.

When you clone and build from the vscode repo, none of these endpoints are configured in the default product.json. Therefore, you generate a “clean” build, without the Microsoft customizations, which is by default licensed under the MIT license.

This repo exists so that you don’t have to download+build from source. The build scripts in this repo clone Microsoft’s vscode repo, run the build commands, and upload the resulting binaries to GitHub releases. These binaries are licensed under the MIT license. Telemetry is disabled.

The Visual Studio Code license referenced is a short read. You should read it if you use VS Code.

Atom discuss.atom.io

Is GitHub Codespaces a death knell for the Atom Editor?

May 7th, 2020: A discussion appears on Atom’s forum…

I use Atom for a few years now and was worried back then about the acquisition of Github from Microsoft. And now I read about Github Codespaces, which is powered by Visual Studio Code.

I’m a little concerned about this. Do you still support Atom? And do you support Atom in the future? If there are other opportunities of embedding a Editor or innovating would you also choose VS Code over Atom?

What is the future of Atom? Will you slowly move to VS Code and Atom will be on the support line?

All good questions. There’s been no official (or unofficial, that I’ve seen) response from GitHub just yet.

We’ve been following Atom for years now. Many great developers have put their efforts into the editor. But it’s hard to withstand the gravitational pull of VS Code. Even more so now that Microsoft owns GitHub? 🤔

VS Code github.com

GistPad for VS Code 📘

GistPad is a Visual Studio Code extension that allows you to manage GitHub Gists entirely within the editor. You can open, create, delete, fork, star and clone gists, and then seamlessly begin editing files as if they were local.

The big idea here is to use gists to seamlessly create your “very own developer library”. The interactive playgrounds is pretty cool, too.

GistPad for VS Code 📘

Go Time Go Time #106

Code editors and language servers

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.

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