GitHub Codespaces, Welcome to the Party!

GitHub has announced the private beta of GitHub Codespaces, which provide container-based dev environments for GitHub projects. This aligns with the vision of describing developer environments in code, which offers benefits such as eliminating onboarding friction, enabling remote work, and ensuring everyone gets the same setup. Gitpod is a similar solution that also allows users to take snapshots of any state of their dev environment and share exact clones of it. The integration of VS Code or Eclipse Theia into these environments provides powerful tools for developers. GitHub's investment in automated developer environments will help promote this new way of developing software, which is expected to improve lead times from ideas to production.