Coding in the cloud with Codespaces (Interview)

The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

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.

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Featuring:

• Cory Wilkerson – Twitter, GitHub
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Jerod Santo – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn

Show Notes:

• GitHub’s Engineering Team has moved to Codespaces
• Cory’s companion Twitter thread to his blog post
• Codespaces marketing page
• Kelsey Hightower on Twitter — “Back in the day we wrote code on our own computers.”

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!