What Happens When Software Development Environments Move to the Cloud? (ieee.org) 117
An anonymous reader quotes IEEE Spectrum:
If you're a newly hired software engineer, setting up your development environment can be tedious. If you're lucky, your company will have a documented, step-by-step process to follow. But this still doesn't guarantee you'll be up and running in no time. When you're tasked with updating your environment, you'll go through the same time-consuming process. With different platforms, tools, versions, and dependencies to grapple with, you'll likely encounter bumps along the way.
Austin-based startup Coder aims to ease this process by bringing development environments to the cloud. "We grew up in a time where [Microsoft] Word documents changed to Google Docs. We were curious why this wasn't happening for software engineers," says John A. Entwistle, who founded Coder along with Ammar Bandukwala and Kyle Carberry in 2017. "We thought that if you could move the development environment to the cloud, there would be all sorts of cool workflow benefits."
With Coder, software engineers access a preconfigured development environment on a browser using any device, instead of launching an integrated development environment installed on their computers... To ensure security, all source code and related development activities are hosted on a company's infrastructure — Coder doesn't host any data. Organizations can deploy Coder on their private servers or on cloud computing platforms such as Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform. This option could be advantageous for banks, defense organizations, and other companies handling sensitive data.
One of Coder's customers is the U.S. Air Force, the article points out -- and thats not the only government agency that's interested in their success.
When Coder closed $30 million in Series B funding last month (bringing total funding to $43 million), one of their backers was a venture capital firm with ties to America's Central Intelligence Agency.
Austin-based startup Coder aims to ease this process by bringing development environments to the cloud. "We grew up in a time where [Microsoft] Word documents changed to Google Docs. We were curious why this wasn't happening for software engineers," says John A. Entwistle, who founded Coder along with Ammar Bandukwala and Kyle Carberry in 2017. "We thought that if you could move the development environment to the cloud, there would be all sorts of cool workflow benefits."
With Coder, software engineers access a preconfigured development environment on a browser using any device, instead of launching an integrated development environment installed on their computers... To ensure security, all source code and related development activities are hosted on a company's infrastructure — Coder doesn't host any data. Organizations can deploy Coder on their private servers or on cloud computing platforms such as Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform. This option could be advantageous for banks, defense organizations, and other companies handling sensitive data.
One of Coder's customers is the U.S. Air Force, the article points out -- and thats not the only government agency that's interested in their success.
When Coder closed $30 million in Series B funding last month (bringing total funding to $43 million), one of their backers was a venture capital firm with ties to America's Central Intelligence Agency.
How can you say security (Score:5, Insightful)
And "The Cloud" in the same sentence without fingers and toes crossed?
Re:How can you say security (Score:5, Insightful)
I like this line:
"We thought that if you could move the development environment to the cloud, there would be all sorts of cool workflow benefits."
Just like that? There will be "cool workflows"? How about you decide what it is you're actually selling besides not even bothering to fill in your buzzwords? And how about a workflow that works instead of being "cool".
This asshole is selling the new hotness! Buy now! He's sure it'll be really cool, even though he isn't saying why you should be interested. But it'll be really cool!
Re:How can you say security (Score:5, Insightful)
"What Happens When Software Development Environments Move to the Cloud? "
They get way more expensive!
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I've already seen the forum entries, so I know; the cool workflow benefit is that when the tool is down, the workers get to fuck off for free!
Just like the xkcd where they shout "compiling!" to the boss.
If they had their own tools, they'd have to keep working even when somebody trips over the router's plug. (oops, sry)
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Re: How can you say security (Score:1)
LHTR. âoeCoolâ is clearly written to modify âoebenefitsâ, not âoeworkflowâ
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I like this line:
"We thought that if you could move the development environment to the cloud, there would be all sorts of cool workflow benefits."
Just like that? There will be "cool workflows"? How about you decide what it is you're actually selling besides not even bothering to fill in your buzzwords? And how about a workflow that works instead of being "cool".
This asshole is selling the new hotness! Buy now! He's sure it'll be really cool, even though he isn't saying why you should be interested. But it'll be really cool!
Sure. It's like Windows NT, it's NEW. The future, right? So many people had no clue that Windows NT was the networking stuff they couldn't give away the year before. Just call it NEW and it took off.
Just follow buzz words, they won't let you down. LOL.
Re:How can you say security (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't get too excited...
This is a slashvertisement.
None of these products should be considered for real world use.
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My development environment is mine. I'm not moving it to the cloud, or even a local server. It belongs on my own machine.
Screw depending on others, over the internet.
That's also why I don't "subscribe" to software, or use web-based apps.
I want the stuff I use to be MINE, and to work whenever I want it to work.
Re:How can you say security (Score:5, Informative)
I looked at one of these years ago. It was rejected for the same reason that many commercial IDEs get rejected: you can't keep old versions around.
Once firmware is fully tested I don't want to upgrade the IDE or compiler years later when I need to make small changes. I need to keep the old version around, so if it's stuck in the cloud or if I need some specific rental licence thing that has long expired and isn't sold any more it's a non-starter.
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And "The Cloud" in the same sentence without fingers and toes crossed?
The same way you can say "On Premesis" and "Security" in the same sentence without fingers and toes crossed. Unless you think that IT manager you are paying $125k per year along with his small team of system-admins with a few years of experience are really keeping your small data center secure.
Most companies would have their IT systems become far more secure by moving to the cloud. There are new risks by moving to the cloud, but often far less than the risks your average company already has by trying to do
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IT systems and development environments are two different things. A good developers team leader will buffer the team members from IT. In the firmware lab I maintained the IT people weren't allowed to touch the machines. Their job was to maintain and secure the egress.
The IT team are the data janitors.
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I've had similar setups, developers were responsible for their own development environments. If they screwed them up they were supposed to fix them. If they couldn't, then they'd put in a request of the support admins and would get attended to when there was time.
If a dev team impacted their timelines because they screwed up their environment that was on them.
Sometimes that model works, sometimes it doesn't
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Or your support folk are competent... (Score:2)
And have either provided a machine with a image (ghost, clonezilla, whatever) applied to it with everything you need or they provide a VM configured the same either to run locally via whatever virtualization software, or a client pointed towards their own cloud or cloud provider.
I have lots of things to complain about the environment and tools I use at work - but me having to set up and maintain a configuration isn't one of them.
Heck even before our forced work from home thing we had some remote workers, th
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Even simpler, the company can put those environment/configuration files into a git repository and then just point their new employees at it.
Re:Or your support folk are competent... (Score:5, Insightful)
Never seen a company where support folk supported dev setups. I mean, I guess it's technically possible. It was always we the devs who would automate dev environment setup as much as possible to help the next guy.
I did the remote-dev-machine thing for the last few tears of my career. "In the cloud", but I was at Amazon so it was our cloud, so maybe not strictly comparable. In any case, it was very convenient in some ways: you could have a much more powerful machine for building than a laptop, but still use it from anywhere. But the lag was always noticeable. Depending on your coding/typing style, the effect of lag can be nothing or horrible, it's very subjective I think. But it sure did make the constant moves to new desks/buildings easy. And if something happened to your laptop, it was no big deal.
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Maybe it is unusual, but we have a single help desk guy dedicated to helping his fellow workers in ITS - server admins, developers, the networking guys, and even the other help desk people. For us devs, he works with our technology stack manager to determine what versions of what software to have installed - which gets tricky considering the near antique stuff we use.
So, now it's company server and thin clients? (Score:2)
Didn't we do this, where a compiler license came with an IBM support suit and millions in contracts?
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It made sense in an age where your company bought a $10k server and then maxed it out and are trying to figure out how to upgrade and also control and predict future costs.
The hardware is so cheap, it seems like a lot of companies that already have sysadmins should be running their own cloud. Hardware is cheap and all the software is designed for horizontal scaling, why would you need to outsource hosting other than at the low end for VPS services?
Above us is only latency (Score:1)
Besides, if you hire a developer who can't install the OS and set up his preferred editor, I think some questions of competency should be raised.
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Is setting up a dev environment that taxing a task?
Yes. Especially in Automotive/Aerospace.
Solutions looking for problems (Score:4, Informative)
This is a classic example of solutions looking for problems.
Granted, these problems are real. But they shouldn't be, and that's just a sad fact.
IDEs have become absolutely complicated clusterfuck nightmares.
After coding for over 20 years, I've settled into just using Sublime Text. 95% of the job is just having a solid text editor. Right out of the box, it just "works". With this, there isn't a need for a lot of the "integration" that these other tools provide.
Code for me is on a central server with SMB/NFS shares easily enough mounted on any machine I want to dev from. Those same shares are also accessed from various VMs/Containers/Jails. I edit the code on Sublime locally, and then just F5 the web page, and BAM it works. I'm absolutely content not having these two things (editor and browser) be the exact same window but different tab. The OS already has a task bar for switching between the windows, which is good enough! (and for me, they're usually on different monitors anyways)
This type of environment is super easy to scale up, and scale out, too. It is also easy to onboard new hires. Just give them a computer with any OS they want. Sublime runs on all of them. Setup the network shares for them. And... that's it. You're already done.
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You want to see something of an improvment to programming, check out Blueprints for Unreal Engine 4. I've always been skeptical, anti-visual coding technologies thus far, but this one manages to integrate with C++ fairly tightly and without a giant abstraction layer.
You make classes in C++ and use them in Blueprint as nodes and vice versa. Blueprint won't let you hook up the wrong type, and it forces people to look at an actual flow chart of what's going on. Too much bad code is written because of a misconc
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IDEs have become absolutely complicated clusterfuck nightmares.
What?
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IDEs have become absolutely complicated clusterfuck nightmares.
What?
I think what he means is that IDEs have become absolutely complicated clusterfuck nightmares.
I use a text editor + autotools, and it looks that way to me, too; IDEs waste a lot of time whenever you're doing the 2nd most likely thing, which is often if you're doing anything interesting. If you're doing the examples in the book then you're only ever doing the 1st most likely thing, and the IDE appears to be saving time.
In the end, if you're doing anything interesting you have to know what is happening under t
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I get why people choose not to use an IDE, but IDEs aren't complicated.
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I get why people choose not to use an IDE, but IDEs aren't complicated.
It may be that you're only using it as a text editor, or you don't do much with it generally.
Especially if your concept of what the programmer does is just press those buttons. Or if finding the compile errors was expected to be a challenge.
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If that's all you're doing in an IDE then why even bother using an IDE? The problem with IDE's is that while they all do many of the same things, they all seem to do it slightly differently. Kind of like other tools like version control systems - if all you do is checkout/edit/checkin then they are all pretty much the same, but once you get into more advanced things like branching/merging/tagging/whatever then you've got to deal with the particulars of how that functionality has been implemented even if t
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he means they are not complicated to use. I disagree. They are often somewhat complicated to learn, especially the ones that are for more than writing web pages with Javascript in them. However, if you are a software developer and "somewhat complicated to learn" is a showstopper, you need to find a different job.
Re:Solutions looking for problems (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a lot that I agree with in your comment, but I disagree with this statement:
95% of the job is just having a solid text editor
Obviously the text editor is hugely important. But there are a lot of "make it or break it" features that I look for in an IDE that go beyond the editor.
Can I rename an interface and have every consumer of that interface throughout my project automatically update to reflect the change?
Can I drag and drop a file within my project to a new folder, and have every reference of the original path automatically updated to reflect the new path ?
Can my IDE warn me when I'm consuming an interface improperly, saving me time before the compiler or runtime yells at me?
Code-completion is a controversial topic, but I find that when the IDE gets it right I lean on it a lot. So does it get it right ?
Version Control - While I actually drop to the command line for git / VC more often than using the various IDE features - there a a couple of IDE features that I would not want to live without: the ability to commit, and the ability to track / un-track a specific file.
Diffs are also a lot nicer within an IDE IMO, and I'm treating this as separate than VC features because I often lean on the IDE's local history when I need to remind myself of what a piece of code looked like before I changed it (though you could argue that a text editor could easily support this functionality).
How much of the '100%' of an IDE's job those features amount to will vary from dev to dev. But for me they are way more than 5% as they are features that I personally wouldn't want to live without.
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The idea that there is a "make it or break it" feature is obtuse, refuted easily by the existence of people not using the feature.
Then you list things that nobody is missing by not using an IDE. Did you know that people using text editors, also use version control? Did you know that most IDEs get their diffs from a CLI tool under the hood?
Why the hell are you moving files around so often that you want a tool to automatically try to parse out anything that was a path? That seems reckless, and a sign of poor
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You left out integrating debugging. Right-click, run to cursor. See all the local variables in the function, or just run the program and it breaks into the debugger when it crashes. I don't know what I'd do without that. It's been a long time since I've used standalone GDB. Has that gotten any better, or gotten a GUI? Yeah, you can inspect variables there too, but with debugging integrated into the IDE they're all right there immediately in a pane. Nothing to type or even click.
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See all the local variables in the function, or just run the program and it breaks into the debugger when it crashes. I don't know what I'd do without that.
You'd have to organize your code better, so it could be understood without relying on a debugger.
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Code-completion is a controversial topic, but I find that when the IDE gets it right I lean on it a lot. So does it get it right ?
Code completion (and debuggers, for that matter) is great. The problem is often people start writing code in a way that is very difficult to understand without it.
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IDEs have become absolutely complicated clusterfuck nightmares.
I have gone back to Emacs and Joe, current IDEs are just a complete waste of time and energy. And they have created a whole generation of "programmers" that cannot do anything without their crutches anymore. Now, if IDEs would actually produce better code or at least make things faster, that would be something. But they do not. They complicated the whole process and people think more about the tools they use than about the result they try to achieve. And that is not good.
Re:Solutions looking for problems (Score:4, Funny)
Emacs!?
Pff. I only use Notepad. Syntax highlighting just distracts me from the code, man.
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You can turn that off. Control your own reality. Man.
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Re: Solutions looking for problems (Score:2)
How about some devops, if it ain't in your companies chosen distribution you don't get to use it. Then setting up your dev enviroment is a piece of cake and managing security going forward is a lot easier.
That's nuts (Score:2)
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Yeah, but if you don't use all this stuff, you can't be Enterprise or Production Grade. /s
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The younger generation don't know what awaits them (Score:5, Insightful)
"We grew up in a time where [Microsoft] Word documents changed to Google Docs. We were curious why this wasn't happening for software engineers,"
We slightly older developers grew up before the cloud madness started to blight the world and we know better.
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Re: The younger generation don't know what awaits (Score:2)
There are a fuck ton of annoying glitches in Word, for example, but even on its worst day it still makes Google docs look like a high school project. And don't even get me start on Excel vs Google. The only purpose for Google spreadsheets is a pace up/download Excel sheets for others to view. It's not a functional spreadsheet system. Lotus 1-2-3 on DOS was vastly superior.
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Agreed utterly on the "merits" of Google Apps. Unfortunately, though, yes. Google is all I've used in a professional setting in maybe my last four jobs. About the only useful advantage of it that I can see is being able to "login with Google." Even the Gmail web interface is lousy.
Re: The younger generation don't know what awaits (Score:2)
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For real. And as a point of fact, I would rather use absolutely anything than Google Docs, which is a steaming pile of undergrad thesis level functionality.
The problem seems to be that each new generation of tech folks ise fixated on the five years or so when they were really learning new stuff, and what they learned then became the standard ... for them. I challenge anyone to explain why Google Docs is superior to Office 365 (I mean the web versions of the apps) ... they can't, but then, they won't bother
Not what they wanted to hear (Score:4, Insightful)
one of their backers was a venture capital firm with ties to America's Central Intelligence Agency.
That line will have killed off any prospect of non-american customers.
Maybe they should have kept quiet about that?
Re:Not what they wanted to hear (Score:4, Informative)
No cloud required (Score:5, Informative)
At work we do all our development by using ssh to connect to one of a small set of computers where sysadmins maintain the programming environment. We use emacs for editing code, and we compile from the command line. It works great.
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I used Emacs as recently as 1/2 hour ago. I edited a config file. Then pop it up into git.
I have a saying. Beginners use VI. Professionals can use vi and Emacs. I use it for Perl, Python, C, config files, even data files. Especially for machines that need a data file and not a database. Good old command line tools work well. Easy to understand. I can teach a new guy how to use maintain all that stuff including git.
I don't think I have any gnu version control, sccs, subversion anymore. I think it's all moved
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That's what my inlaws say about their flip phones. Yes, they do work fine to call someone. But most of us like to have a bit more power in our pocket than just a device that can only do voice calls.
Emacs may have been a great back in the day. Once you've got all the commands memorized, and once you've installed all the extra tools you need to do your work, it can even be productive. But as a tool for new programmers (yeah, they are important too!), the learning curve is a killer.
Things get more expensive and more broken... (Score:5, Funny)
"A distributed system is one in which I cannot get something done because a machine I've never heard of is down." --Leslie Lamport
Now consider that "cloud" is just an implementation of "distributed" and that statement has stood the test of time.
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If one machine is down, or even one datacenter, and you can't get your job done, you didn't build a distributed system, you built a multitude of failure points. Of course, I see that all the time.
The point of distributed systems is resiliency. If you don't deliver that, you failed, regardless of what else the system does.
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The funny thing is that.. it often doesn't. Frequently, the goal is to "tick the box" on the buzzword list so you can get another round of VC cash. The owner(s) don't give a rat's ass if it actually does that thing. They care much more about if they can point to a person who signed off (under duress of firing, but without the time, resources, or permission to implement it) on saying, "Yes, we have all the thing!"
Flag as Inappropriate
Naturally, but there's nothing unique about "distributed" for that. It applies to anything about software.
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The largest business driver was scale that centralized solutions could not match.
You cannot scale without resiliency, because very soon the "mean time to failure" becomes "now". A lot of early movers only fixed resiliency issues after the fact, and it didn't take long for them to deeply regret the fundamentally flawed architecture they had shat out, and now were stuck with for years.
I'd say the last 10 years of my career was "our system is now completely unworkable at our current scale, and the business is about to fail because we can't handle it - please fix the architecture somehow".
Re:Things get more expensive and more broken... (Score:5, Insightful)
Today's cloud is the modern version of the timeshare computer bureau of the 1960s/1970s. If history repeats itself, companies will eventually realize that they have a critical dependence on these computing service and bring them in-house, like they did with mainframes (then minis). If going to the cloud is what is needed to gain a centrally-managed development resource, though, then it might be worth it.
There is a need for an easily maintained, consistent from individual-to-individual computing environment, whether it is for software development, or supporting office work, or whatever. Managers seem to vacillate between providing this as a managed resource and letting individuals roll their own; the former holds sway when seeking to reign in chaos, improve quality, and gain assurance of correctness, the latter when penny-pinchers see an opportunity to improve the short-term bottom line and make themselves seem effective at controlling costs (but at a terrible long-term cost to the organization).
I still remember the frustration voiced to me by a software engineer forced off of the centrally-managed minicomputer development environment onto self-managed personal computers in the last 1980s... hours lost to solving little problems and learning how to perform self-care activities that had previously been done by one person supporting 40.
The ultimate answer might be to provide a well-managed in-house capability, but this solution also has the most clearly identifiable costs. Familiarity breeds contempt. Clueless managers then seek to eliminate these costs by either eliminating the in-house central management, or outsourcing. Cycles of "new" approaches each promised to be cheaper/better than whatever precedes them inevitably follow, with each solution merely laying the footing for the next management cost-saving "insights."
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That is an excellent summary of the problem and why this goes back and forth all the time. The only real good solution is having things in-house and really critical things under or on your desk, but as you say clearly identifiable cost and familiarity breed contempt. So we will see this cycle of stupidity continue for the foreseeable future.
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Well there's your problem (Score:5, Insightful)
"We grew up in a time where [Microsoft] Word documents changed to Google Docs. We were curious why this wasn't happening for software engineers," says John A. Entwistle, who founded Coder along with Ammar Bandukwala and Kyle Carberry in 2017.
Okay, I'm admittedly an old codger at this point in life. But assuming these guys really did grow up during that era, a red flag should go up right there. These guys have basically no experience - and, more importantly, no perspective. They're kids (quite literally, actually - I just looked at their profiles on the coder website).
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“During the funding process, we talked with the CTOs of several companies and they got so excited about the potential of having their engineers saving hours a month by our accelerating the computational process or providing analytics,”
They didn't say anything about the programmers they met who were excited, they only mentioned CTOs that were excited.
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Well, given that some of these big companies consider music majors to be competent [marketwatch.com] to fill their CTO and CSO positions... I guess all a startup would need is a well-orchestrated plan. /rimshot
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Nobody cares what your major was, and whatever practices are taught to undergrads are not likely to be the processes used in the real world.
Yes, management is about planning. Yes, puns aside, leadership skills are often portable.
The job of a CTO is often to manage relationships with the leadership of technical departments in other companies that they work with, rather than to make technical decisions. There is probably some VP that makes a technical decision.
Re:Well there's your problem (Score:4, Insightful)
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The CTO is NOT just about relationships, he
You can't know that. As a general statement, it is false.
Some Bargles are blue. bloodhawk is a Bargle.
bloodhawk is blue: T/F
Maybe you know of an example where it is true. But it is easy to imagine a case where it is false; and in fact, it is only because you know that it is false that you are even trying to assert it! You're outraged at reality, and you're demanding that it must be wrong! Maybe at one company it would be wrong, and at another company it would be right, depending on how the responsibilities
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How old was Gates when he started Microsoft?
How old were Larry and Sergey when they founded Google?
So you can't work without access to the Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
What could go wrong?
US West Coast centric people who come up with ideas like this can't imagine life without broadband Internet (and big screens, multi-head for that matter). They don't seem capable of conceiving of the real world with power outages, network outages, and loss of Internet much less people operating on the edge of the Internet.
Cloud is great... (Score:2)
...when you have a reliable internet connection.
So you can totally use this at work and at home, when your ISP isn't shitting the bed.
You can try to use this on your train/bus/carpool commute over a cellular connection, but I doubt it'll work very well.
Using it on a airline flight is going to be a shit show; the US domestic in-flight WiFi is a joke for anything that isn't mild browsing and email/chat clients, so have fun pulling your hair the whole way to your destination.
Also, how is this any better than a
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This is literally the use of an Operating System. It's your space that integrates computational resources and provides abstractions for you, as well as tools to handle them. A desktop environment adds another layer of integration and tooling.
Why exactly do I want to throw away highly polished, time-tested tools, in favor of a broken, half-finished inner platform aiming to do the same thing?
Let's all have a single point of failure! (Score:4, Insightful)
Hope your business plan matches your cloud provider's for ever...
Solved in advance (Score:1)
The solution: Universal Basic Income
Now that we have a solution we like, let's make up a problem to fit it. Hmm. I know. AI takes all the jobs! We can tell that story forever because it's about a dreamed-about future with no expiration date. Bonus: it appeals to the vanity of tech workers.
The only things left to do are congratulate ourselves for being smart, caring visionary heroes and castigate everyone else as uncaring and dumb for not believing the story we just made up. Dividing people into the c
I've had this for years (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yep, and my in-laws' flip phones can make calls just fine too.
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You inlaws flipfone doesn't have a VT100 compatible terminal emulaor, though. Try again.
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Oh of course! Why didn't I think of that!
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Oh, kind of like an IDE!
I already have svn/git (Score:1)
They've invented the IDE! (Score:2)
The whole point of the IDE is to enable programmers to install one tool and be ready to go, instead of having to install many tools separately.
Next, they'll try to patent the concept because it includes the words "in the cloud."
What in the world are they talking about? (Score:3)
At our shop it's a single operation that gets an entire snapshot at a given point of a toolchain, build system and all the dependencies. Takes about 15 minutes to download the disk image and a few more minutes to mount it in overlayFS (so you can also modify it if need be). The entire thing is self-contained and you can have as many of them as you can fit on local storage.
Any shop that hasn't figured out how to do that kind of basic continuous integration and infrastructure doesn't understand the first thing about repeatability.
Remote programming work through VPN (Score:1)
There is no "cloud" only other people's computers. (Score:3, Insightful)
Because software engineers -- at least those who have been around a while -- understand that your data's home should be on your computer.
WTF? (Score:3)
mbed (Score:2)
My first (and really only) experience with a cloud-based IDE is mbed (mbed.com). It is actually pretty good (and free). I went with it, as a hobbiest, because the cost of some of these dev tools was just too high for me to make use of for my little tinkering projects. It's actually very easy to use with something like an STM32 dev board. When you build the project it automatically starts downloading the compiled .bin file to your browser. Then you just drag / drop it onto the file system of the device
Slashdot negativity = this is going to be a huge (Score:2)
I can't remember seeing this much negativity about a technology release on Slashdot since Apple released the iPod. I can remember one amusing post said iPod must be short for "idiots Price our devices", you'd think Apple had just released the biggest lemon ever. And of course the rest is history.
uhhh.. (Score:2)
You get a shitty slow IDE as a subscription ... (Score:3)
... and not for free.
The cloud is what we sell to ordinaries, as a subscription. To minimize Pebkac and maximise automation.
We ourselves use our own computers for coding.
I personally have moved to using Linux almost exclusively and I want total control over my hardware and the runtime.
Naturally. I'm a computer expert.
Aside from that, I like to be crisis-safe with my setups and not to much dependant on services.
I do use GitHub, but only because I don't have the time to maintain a web UI for my central repos.
I do use Google Docs, but only because I like zero-fuss sharing and don't want to maintain a NextCloud.
However, I can ditch these at a moments notice, if things go south and I can only trust this Cloud thing as far as I can rewind my cloud rollout onto own hardware in a single afternoon.
Too Funny (Score:1)
What Happens .. move to the Cloud? (Score:2)
Obvious (Score:2)
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UI churn sucks.
One reason Photoshop is so successful? The UI doesn't change. It still works the same way; 21 versions later.
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And, sadly, the GIMP keeps trying to find 'the right' user interface, when they should just sit still.
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Every time you change your UI, you are also making a demand that they learn a new skill.
It has to follow the same process as any other thing they might interact with, including an up-front heavy duty phase of needing to actively concentrate on using that bit of UI.
Some changes are less jarring: the exact distance and angles between the pedals, steering wheel, and seat in different cars. Some are moderately jarring, but easy enough, like going from 3 on the tree to a short-throw shifter in the center. Some