Provisioning ready-to-code developer environments in the cloud
As a developer, one of the things I’ve grown accustomed to is constantly moving between various projects, their required dependencies, and versions of those dependencies.
Here is a typical workflow that you may be familiar with:
- Select project
- Check dependencies
- Checkout branch
- View readme
- Install tools and dependencies
- Run build
- Run test
- Start coding
We are seeing a rise in cloud developer environments that abstract and automate these steps away, removing friction, improving developer experience, and speeding up development time by just making things easier.
In contrast with the above workflow, what if it was this simple?
- Select project 👩💻
- Start coding 🚀
Over the years we’ve seen the iteration and maturation of this idea, with projects like Replit, StackBlitx, CodeSandbox, JSFiddle, and countless others improving over the course time.
The obvious end goal here was to make it so that anyone, on any machine, anywhere in the world, could jump in and start building, contributing, and collaborating on production codebases without having to go through monotonous, time consuming, and often complex environment setup and from any machine in the world that had a browser.
This vision is finally starting to come to fruition with projects like Gitpod and GitHub Codespaces being used in real production codebases, and as the case with Gitpod, free and accessible to anyone in the world today.
In this post, I want to show you how you can move your development environment to the cloud with Gitpod.
Gitpod Overview
Gitpod lets you automate the deployment of Github projects and start coding them directly in any browser with a complete VSCode setup.
You can spin up pre-configured, standardized dev environments from any git context when you need them and close them down (and forget about them)…
