From Theia to OpenVSCode Server - A history of Cloud IDEs from Gitpod's IDE architect

I am Anton and I am leading IDE development at Gitpod. Almost a decade ago, I joined Sven Efftinge and the team to work on open-source developer tools and help companies around the world to adopt them. We learned the intricacies of different desktop IDEs (Eclipse, IntelliJ, VS Code) and web editors (Monaco, Ace, Orion, and CodeMirror) - and eventually ended up building Gitpod.

A big part of my journey was shaped by the editing experience of cloud-based developer environments and today I want to share our decisions, underlying thought process, connection to VS Code and where we go from here - both as an industry and as a company.

When we improved developer tooling for a San Francisco based client five years ago, we realized that the technology is now finally there to bring to the mainstream what Google, Facebook and several others already started years ago: moving software development to the cloud by providing fully automated and ephemeral developer environments.

This recap is solely about the editing experience. This is important to stress because a big misconception in our ecosystem is that those remote, cloud-based developer environments are web or online IDEs. While IDEs are an important building block, platforms such as Gitpod are so much more. Think orchestration, provisioning, operating system, databases, compilers and all other tools you require to be productive.

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