[sterlinm]

I'm kind of obsessed with this space and have spent way too long setting up VS Code and RStudio IDEs on my homelab.

One area I struggle with when thinking about building container-based development environments is the best way to avoid mixing in your IDE specific dependencies with your project dependencies. I think some of the commercial tools do this, but I haven't gotten in set up well in my homelab.

I just came across two articles by a former GitPod employer who moved to Coder (these are the two main providers of open-source VS Code in the browser solutions). They're both really interesting.

The first is on how effectively Microsoft has used VS Code to fracture the market place to their advantage by strategically open-sourcing parts of VS Code while keeping many of its best features proprietary (Pylance, the python language server is a good example of this). https://ghuntley.com/fracture/

The second article is about why he thinks Coder's strategy is more promising than GitPod's prompting him to go work for them. It's not as detailed, but it touches on some of the parts of container-based development environments that I've found overly limiting. https://ghuntley.com/integrate/