<story><title>Cloud9 Acquired by Amazon</title><url>https://c9.io/blog/great-news/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jozan</author><text>Wouldn&amp;#x27;t virtual machine basically do the same thing? I&amp;#x27;ve taken some classes where teacher gave us an image where everything was already installed and configured. Everything went smoothly.&lt;p&gt;However, Cloud9 is much more convenient since it runs entirely on browser but VM solution could work in case C9 discontinues its free tier.</text></item><item><author>hyperdeficit</author><text>I really hope that the Cloud9 service keeps running, and maintains the free version that it currently provides. I have been using Cloud9 with the Michael Hartl Rails Tutorial to teach new programmers the basics of programming with Ruby and Rails and it has greatly reduced the friction for them to start learning.&lt;p&gt;In previous classes we had the students setup a Ruby and Rails environment on their own systems and not only did that take multiple sessions to get setup, but then we were dealing with environment differences that took the focus away from the basics of learning Ruby nearly every session.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>superuser2</author><text>&amp;gt;I&amp;#x27;ve taken some classes where teacher gave us an image where everything was already installed and configured.&lt;p&gt;My department tries this occasionally. It fails because students either have&lt;p&gt;a) cheap pieces of shit with unreasonably poor performance under virtualization (I&amp;#x27;m talking multiple seconds to bring a different window to foreground under Ubuntu)&lt;p&gt;b) Retina MBPs, on which Linux has absolute garbage text rendering due to quarter-assed (half-assed is giving it too much credit) per-application support for high-DPI displays. Staring at code for hours is hard enough when the code isn&amp;#x27;t blurry.&lt;p&gt;The department runs a Linux lab in one of the libraries with professionally maintained Ubuntu installs that already have everything professors request for their courses, and provides SSH access to those machines.&lt;p&gt;An interesting side effect is that you either get good at configuring your environment for yourself (to use your own Mac or Linux machine) or you learn to work with just a terminal (use Emacs&amp;#x2F;Vim and Bash over SSH).</text></comment>
<story><title>Cloud9 Acquired by Amazon</title><url>https://c9.io/blog/great-news/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jozan</author><text>Wouldn&amp;#x27;t virtual machine basically do the same thing? I&amp;#x27;ve taken some classes where teacher gave us an image where everything was already installed and configured. Everything went smoothly.&lt;p&gt;However, Cloud9 is much more convenient since it runs entirely on browser but VM solution could work in case C9 discontinues its free tier.</text></item><item><author>hyperdeficit</author><text>I really hope that the Cloud9 service keeps running, and maintains the free version that it currently provides. I have been using Cloud9 with the Michael Hartl Rails Tutorial to teach new programmers the basics of programming with Ruby and Rails and it has greatly reduced the friction for them to start learning.&lt;p&gt;In previous classes we had the students setup a Ruby and Rails environment on their own systems and not only did that take multiple sessions to get setup, but then we were dealing with environment differences that took the focus away from the basics of learning Ruby nearly every session.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sytse</author><text>I think that the future is having not one but many workspaces. If you review a MR? Start that workspace. Help someone with a question? Login to their workspace. In GitLab we want every issue and every commit to have an IDE button &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;gitlab.com&amp;#x2F;gitlab-org&amp;#x2F;gitlab-ce&amp;#x2F;issues&amp;#x2F;12759&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;gitlab.com&amp;#x2F;gitlab-org&amp;#x2F;gitlab-ce&amp;#x2F;issues&amp;#x2F;12759&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;BTW congrats to the Cloud9 team. They made a great product and selling to Amazon will ensure it lives on.</text></comment>