August 2019 Summaries

Continuous dev environments are a crucial part of an optimized DevOps toolchain that allow instantaneous spinning up of ready-to-code developer environments from any Git state. Automating dev environments using code can reduce friction in onboarding and task switching, improve reproducibility across the project, and save developers' time and energy. Disposable dev environments make it easy to reproduce bugs and free developers from cleaning up after use. Prebuilt dev environments eliminate waiting for builds, while browser-based dev environments provide powerful tools within a browser tab. Sharing user-specific settings can improve team productivity. Automated ready-to-code dev environments are expected to become mainstream in the future as they significantly improve developer productivity.

Gitpod has announced the start of its public beta phase for VS Code extensions in their cloud IDE. This feature now supports over 10,000 existing VS Code extensions, allowing developers to use their favorite tools and languages such as Scala, Swift, and F#. The integration of these extensions is part of the project's configuration, ensuring that each dev environment is tailored and optimized for the specific project at hand. Gitpod users can now install and test new extensions by dragging and dropping .vsix files into the extension view, with the option to share their new experience with teammates by pushing changes to a remote Git repository.