[oppression] GitHub: 60 hrs/mo free in-browser / in-cloud dev spaces

[Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many]

https://github.blog/2022-11-10-whats-new-with-codespaces-from-github-universe-2022/

What’s new with Codespaces from GitHub Universe 2022
We’re giving GitHub users 60 free hours each month on Codespaces.
Learn what else we shipped for Codespaces at Universe this year.

Nik Molnar
What’s new with Codespaces from GitHub Universe 2022
Since releasing Codespaces to customers of GitHub’s Team and
Enterprise plans last year, hundreds of thousands of developers have
left their local development environments for the speed, agility,
security, and collaboration that cloud based development has to offer.
Our customers have all felt a similar pain when trying to contribute
to a new inner or open source project, or when they’re learning a new
language, and that’s the laborious pain of setting up and maintaining
dev environments. But being able to start coding immediately without
worrying about dev environment setup isn’t something that resonated
only inside of organizations; it has also resonated with individual
developers, maintainers of open source projects, and learners of all
kinds.

Codespaces has been a game changer for my open source project, from
helping quickly ship higher-quality changes to being able to run
end-to-end testing on just an iPad.
- Raffaele Di Fazio, ExternalDNS maintainer
Codespaces has been a huge help for me to get standardized development
environments and saved me a lot of time in setting up environments. It
also makes my environments reproducible for collaborators and even for
myself.
- Rishit Dagli, Kubernetes contributor
With that in mind, over the course of this week, Codespaces is
becoming generally available for all GitHub Free and Pro plan users.
We’re also excited to provide every developer with up to 60 hours (90
hours for Pro plan users) per month of free Codespaces usage so they
can start building in seconds and join us in our mission to accelerate
human progress through developer collaboration.

In addition to Codespaces becoming generally available, our team has
been working hard to create many new and improved Codespaces
experiences. Here’s details on all the updates we showed this week at
Universe 2022.

Choice in tooling

Developers have strong preferences and widely varying opinions about
their chosen tooling. As developers ourselves, we understand and
strive to support a wide array of tooling options and personalizations
to suit virtually all developer preferences. So, this week we
announced Codespaces public beta support for JetBrains IDEs, in
addition to our existing support for VS Code in the browser or on the
desktop, VIM, and emacs. Now, developers can code in the cloud using
the JetBrains IDEs they prefer, like IntelliJ or PyCharm. To connect
to your codespace, download JetBrains Gateway and install the
Codespaces plugin from the JetBrains Marketplace.

Data science, AI, and machine learning

Data scientists and machine learning (ML) practitioners love Jupyter
notebooks. So, to provide further choice in tooling we’ve also added
public beta support for JupyterLab to Codespaces.

Gif demonstrating that you can open Codespaces in Visual Studio Code,
JetBrains Gateway, and JupyterLab.

Additionally, GPU-powered Codespaces are now available in limited
beta. Having access to a GPU from within a codespace allows developers
to run complex ML models much more quickly, and the combination of
GPUs, along with support for Jupyter notebooks and Codespaces’
standardized, repeatable environments make collaboration on data
science and ML workloads much easier since developers don’t have to
struggle with complicated setup and local installations, much less
running on underpowered desktop workstations. Learn more in our
documentation, and to request access to the GPU machine type, or any
additional machine type, please complete the sign up form and we’ll
respond as soon as possible.

New project experiences

We’ve added experiences to make starting new projects from Codespaces
with the most common app frameworks easier using repository templates.
This capability allows users to single-click into a development
environment and get straight to coding—no configuration required. From
there, users can write, test, debug, and run their application,
accessing it from automatically forwarded port(s). For more advanced
scenarios, configuring a development container enables the codespace
to install specific dependencies, run scripts, pre-open files, run
required services or processes, and render app output, resulting in an
unprecedented new project experience for developers.

Gif demonstrating how to start a new project from Codespaces with React.

You can learn how to create repository templates and development
containers to make your app framework easier for new users to try now.



Learning with Codespaces

Logo of LinkedIn Learning

For users new to programming, or developers wanting to take their
skill to the next level, you can now try LinkedIn Learning’s 50+
Codespaces-enabled courses that cover six of the most popular
programming languages, as well as topics like web development, data
science, AI, and ML. These courses will be unlocked on LinkedIn
Learning for free through February 2023.

Codespaces for organizations

For Teams and Enterprises rolling out and managing codespaces at
scale, we’ve added support for organization level APIs and
administrative policies that enable scaling up with confidence. The
organization level APIs, which are generally available, offer a wide
range of management operations to enable integrating Codespaces into
existing workflows and systems. Additionally, administrators can apply
cost control, compliance, and security policies for organization-owned
codespaces to facilitate smooth rolls outs across large teams.

Over the past few years, Rover has faced a variety of challenges in
creating a scalable, reliable, and repeatable development environment.
We decided to explore using Codespaces and the migration was
easier—and far more beneficial—than we anticipated. New development
environments are now ready within three minutes instead of an hour.
We’ve accelerated our code reviews by using Codespaces as testing
environments, and we’re able to scale our engineering organization
without simultaneously scaling our developer support team.
- Ben Menesini, Rover
Prebuilding Codespaces in open source projects

Codespaces prebuilds have been generally available since June and
enable consistently fast start times for codespaces created against
large repositories and complex applications. Prebuilt codespaces is
such a marked improvement in these scenarios that it was listed as one
of the cornerstone capabilities that enabled GitHub.com’s own
developers to bring dev environment bootstrapping time down from 45
minutes to 10 seconds.

We believe that all developers should be able to contribute to open
source quickly and easily, and that Codespaces, with prebuilds, is the
best way to achieve that. As such, we’re inviting maintainers of open
source projects in free organizations to apply for prebuild storage
grants that would enable many projects to use prebuilds free of
charge.

Wrap-up

Over the past year, we’ve celebrated in the success that organizations
like Duolingo and Vanta have enabled by using Codespaces, and with the
general availability and included free usage, we can’t wait to see
what it can do for every GitHub user and the open source community at
large.

Lastly, I’d like to personally thank the Codespaces team! Our group of
engineers, product managers, designers, researchers, marketers,
business folks, and other partners from across the company have
collectively brought to life the vision of what the future of software
development will look like. Their obsession with making developers’
lives better has only been matched by their drive and hard work. Thank
you, team, for effectively eliminating yak shaving for so many in our
industry. Cheers! 🍻

Now, it’s your turn. Go ahead, try Codespaces today, and let us know
what you think. 😀