October 2021 Summaries

Tailscale and Gitpod have partnered to enable secure, professional software development from anywhere. With VS Code remote and Jetbrains' remote development support, more than 80% of developers will use an IDE with built-in functionality to connect to developer environments running in the cloud by the end of 2021. Gitpod provisions and orchestrates remote developer environments, enabling users to develop from anywhere. Tailscale is built on top of the point-to-point open-source WireGuard protocol which powers an encrypted mesh network or 'tailnet' that directly connects a developer environment to resources as well as colleagues' developer environments. With Gitpod and Tailscale, developers can securely access cloud or on-prem resources, spin up connected Gitpod workspaces, share staged resources with colleagues, access package registries, and complete coding interviews.

This article traces the history of cloud-based integrated development environments (IDEs) from Theia to OpenVSCode Server. It discusses how remote developer environments have evolved and highlights the importance of VS Code in shaping this evolution. The author, Anton, who leads IDE development at Gitpod, shares his journey with cloud-based IDEs and their connection to VS Code. He explains why they started building Theia under the Eclipse Foundation and how it led to the creation of OpenVSX marketplace. The article also details Gitpod's transition from Theia to VS Code and the development of OpenVSCode Server, which has received positive feedback from large companies such as GitLab, VMware, Uber, SAP, Sourcegraph, RStudio, and SUSE. The author expresses excitement about the future of cloud-based IDEs and hopes for more open-source contributions in this area.

Gitpod introduces Teams & Projects to enhance the developer experience by providing consistent, standardized, and fully-automated dev environments. The new features aim to resolve three pain points: simplifying project setup description, enabling Prebuilds for projects, and creating teams in Gitpod. Teams can be easily created, managed, and collaborators can be invited with a simple invite link. Projects can be automated by adding repositories and triggering prebuilds. These features are currently in Beta, and feedback is encouraged.

Tabnine and Gitpod have partnered to enhance the developer experience by reducing friction in workflows. The collaboration integrates AI code completion from Tabnine with ephemeral developer environments provided by Gitpod, allowing developers to automate and speed up their workflows. This partnership aims to improve the overall developer experience while maintaining transparency, openness, and flexibility in product design. Developers can try out this integration using pre-built templates or add Tabnine to their own Gitpod projects with a single click.