Predictions after Github Satellite 2020

They support VSCode, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they documented a protocol to allow integration with other IDEs.

Acquiring a product like Gitter might be a good move to make this a well-round product.

They can now identify potential issues based on code patterns and libraries, such as potential SQL injections.

These are big improvements on top of the CVE and secret leak inspection they already had (those have saved my teams a few times).

I don’t have experience with this area, and I can’t comment on what this means to the industry.

The recent launches are exciting for the current generation of developers, and they might change how the next generation works. Will we ever spend more than a couple of minutes onboarding on a project? Will production finally become a label instead of a separate environment?

Let me tell you about my predictions.

Products in the development tools space that should watch out:

It’s clear to me that Github will integrate Codespaces with Azure and start offering integration with all of their managed services (e.g., databases, containers, serverless, etc.). Many companies are looking for off-the-shelf solutions that enable their engineers to be productive and ship fast; they don’t care about networking, load balancers, instances, or container orchestration.

AWS and GCP have great Cloud offerings, but they don’t have the product that every developer uses and loves.

I imagine they’ll eventually take market share from solutions for the production environment too. After all, we’ve been trying to make development as close to production and Github may enable that.

Products that need to watch out:

Cloud providers such as AWS/GCP/Azure let you provision very similar environments for development, QA, and production. Ideally, you spin up those environments with the same tools & configuration but change a few endpoints. We are not far from a world where there is no “local” environment-developers won’t build and run projects out of their laptops.

I bet projects will go from development to production without leaving Github.

Are all monopolies bad? I don’t know, probably. It’s scary to think that Microsoft can control everything from the development hardware (Surface) to the development tools (Github) to the final product in the Cloud (Azure). It’s crazy to think that all of this can be in the hands of Microsoft. Azure hasn’t been a tremendous hit, but Github is unchallenged in the developer space. The more they add to Github and abstract the Cloud components, the better it is for Azure and Microsoft.

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