Coding in the cloud with Codespaces (Interview)

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. Join the discussion Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Fly.io – Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. Featuring: Cory Wilkerson – GitHub, X Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X 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!