I used Cider while at Google, and setup Google Codespaces at the startup I'm working at now.
Some notes:
- Codespaces uses the devcontainer spec, so folks can use our setup offline if they want
- I get far fewer questions about how to do XYZ, and when I do get questions, I can almost always reproduce them, which is a breath of fresh air
- We do pay a fair chunk to use high CPU/memory machines, this is worth it for us. I have a very lightweight laptop that I use
- Some of our developers like having multiple separate codespaces at a time as a way to separate out different projects. I just use branches, but some folks like the codespace workflow.
- I can run vulnerability scans over our dev environment which is nice
- When I onboard devs, I can get them to the point of running our full application suite in a 15 minute meeting
- I don't have to deal with m1 vs not-m1 issues that were popping up all the time before we made the switch
- Having a linux base is nice, as that's what we use in production. We deal with some annoying dependencies and not having to install them on Mac anymore is nice
- It's seamless changing between my laptop and desktop that I work from. All the code is instantly on the other when I switch, even if I haven't pushed up to git
- Chrome + Notion + Slack + our task tracker app + etc. take up a lot of memory now adays. Even with 32gb machines, folks often would run out of memory trying to run our app. On a codespace, all of the memory is dedicated to just the app.
- With prebuilds, when a developer opens a codespace, we already have all of our python, node, go, etc. dependencies preinstalled (also things like awscli, terraform, pre-commit, VsCode extensions, docker). They just run `aws sso login` and then `start --serve` and things work.
- I live in an RV, and sometimes don't have great internet, but my Codespace is on a remote machine that does always have fast internet. Even being an internet-based service, this works great for me.
The biggest cons:
- Some of our devs were really passionate that they preferred other IDEs than VsCode. Some other IDEs do now have support, but they aren't as supported as VsCode yet
- Codespaces have downtime occasionally (as did Cider at Google). Most folks just use a local copy/devcontainer of the app or do other things when this happens, but some folks choose to always use devcontainers/local copies because this annoys them so much. At Google, we just posted memes when this happened and went home.
- Codespaces become inactive after a controllable amount of time has passed. Some folks don't like the 40 seconds to reactivate a codespace after being inactive for more than 30 minutes, so they either write scripts to keep their codespaces alive or just don't use codespaces at all.
Overall:
- most of our newer employees exclusively use codespaces.
- A few of our older employees who developed locally for years have chosen to continue developing locally, and will just hop into a codespace to run a quick terraform command or something if their local version gives errors.
- The number of questions we deal with regarding issues on a single users' machine have gone down dramatically, and tbh most of the questions come from folks who use the local still
- We do pay a pretty penny for this, but it's a small fraction of our overall cloud spend or costs per employee