Roben Kleene

When I first saw Codespaces, I immediately wanted it. With ubiquitous high-speed internet, why not offload more work to the cloud? What could our devices look like if most of their power came from the server? What would their battery life be like?

Seamlessly leveraging remote resources has always felt like an idea that’s just around the corner, but never arrives. Just having a big beefy machine on site usually ends up being the most practical solution (outside of some specialized use cases)1.

Codespaces is perhaps the biggest play ever to take remote development more mainstream. Development has always been a prime candidate for remote computing, because with time-sharing machines, it’s how the roots of programming itself began2.

GitHub Codespaces began as a different product, called Visual Studio Online. Visual Studio Online was announced on the Visual Studio Blog in November 2019. Then, in April 2020, it was renamed to Visual Studio Codespaces, Nik Molnar described the motivation behind the name change on the same blog:

We learned that developers are finding Visual Studio Online to be much more than just an “editor in the browser”. They are saying that “the capabilities of this cloud-hosted dev environment make it the space where I want to write all my code“.

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