April 2022 Summaries

Gitpod and JetBrains have partnered to solve the "works on my machine" problem by integrating their products for remote development. This partnership allows professional software engineers to work in reproducible developer environments provisioned by Gitpod using their favorite desktop IDE from JetBrains, including IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, GoLand, and PhpStorm. The integration aims to improve the developer experience, security, and collaboration while maintaining local editing experiences with shortcuts, keybindings, and themes. This partnership is a significant step towards adoption of remote development in the industry.

Gitpod has introduced a new feature allowing developers to access workspaces via SSH with just one line of code. This can be done by copying and pasting the SSH command from the dashboard, making it easier for users who prefer working in terminal environments or need to execute commands within a workspace. The update aims to improve developer experience and make Gitpod more seamless for professional teams using various languages, technologies, and workflows.

Gitpod has introduced a new Installer that simplifies the installation process of their product. Previously, they used Helm to orchestrate installations, but as features were added, the complexity of their Helm charts increased significantly. The new Gitpod Installer is written in Go and offers several advantages over Helm charts, including easier maintenance, less configuration surface, and improved type safety. It also provides a user-centric installation experience with fewer knobs and switches for users to manage. Additionally, the Installer supports backwards compatibility and version manifests, ensuring that a specific release of Gitpod always runs with a deterministic set of services and dependencies. The Installer is designed to be scalable across teams within Gitpod and enforces certain decisions as validation constraints at config and cluster levels for stability and ease of troubleshooting.