You’re just a devcontainer.json away (Interview)

This week we’re joined by Brigit Murtaugh, Product Manager on the Visual Studio Code team at Microsoft, and we’re talking about Development Containers and the Dev Container spec. Ever since we talked with Cory Wilkerson about Coding in the cloud with Codespaces we’ve wanted to get the Changelog.com codebase setup with a dev environment in the cloud to more easily support contributions. After getting a drive-by contribution from Chris Eggert to add a Dev Container spec to our codebase, we got curious and reached out to Brigit and asked her to come on the show to give us all the details.

Discuss on Changelog News

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Sponsors:

• Postman – Build APIs together — More than 20 million developers use Postman for building and using APIs. Postman simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration so you can create better APIs—faster.
• Square – Develop on the platform that sellers trust. There is a massive opportunity for developers to support Square sellers by building apps for today’s business needs. Learn more at changelog.com/square to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you.
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Featuring:

• Brigit Murtaugh – GitHub, LinkedIn
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Jerod Santo – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn

Show Notes:

• containers.dev
• Dev containers templates and on GitHub
• Dev containers CLI
• PR #437 (from Chris Eggert): Add GitHub Codespaces support - https://containers.dev 👀
• Beginner’s Series to: Dev Containers
• The Changelog #459: Coding in the cloud with Codespaces with Cory Wilkerson
• The Changelog #277: The Story of Visual Studio Code

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Timestamps:

(00:00) - This week on The Changelog
(01:12) - Sponsor: Postman
(02:27) - Start the show!
(10:04) - Is resistance futile?
(13:35) - Start backwards from the DX
(16:54) - Will VS Code become an IDE?
(19:46) - Anything from anywhere
(25:16) - Dev Container vs Codespaces?
(28:14) - Sponsor: Square
(29:06) - VS Code and Dev Containers
(33:15) - Where does editor config live?
(35:36) - devcontainer.local?
(42:36) - The best pitch for cloud coding
(46:42) - So where is the code?
(51:11) - How do credentials work?
(53:29) - Moar templates
(56:33) - Go curious? Spin up a container.
(59:20) - It's JUST that easy
(1:00:43) - What's the downside?
(1:03:11) - They've pre-baked images
(1:05:38) - Have we covered it all?
(1:07:53) - Closing
(1:08:07) - Outro