Until those things go away.

A case study: DuckDuckHack used Codio, which "worked" until DDG decided to call it a wrap on accepting outside contributions. DDG stopped paying for Codio, and because of that, there was no longer an easy way to replicate the development environment—the DuckDuckHack repos remained available (still do), but you can't pop over into Codio and play around with it. Furthermore, because Codio had been functioning as a sort of crutch to paper over the shortcomings in the onboarding/startup process for DuckDuckHack, there was never any pressure to make sure that contributors could easily get up and running without access to a Codio-based development environment.

It's interesting that, no matter how many times cloud-based Web IDEs have been attempted and failed to displace traditional, local development, people keep getting suckered into it, despite the history of observable downsides.

What's also interesting is the conflation of two things:

1. software that works by treating the Web browser as a ubiquitous, reliable interpreter (in a way that neither /usr/local/bin/node nor /usr/bin/python3 are reliably ubiquitous)—NB: and running locally, just like Node or Python (or go build or make run or...)—and

2. the idea that development toolchains aiming for "zero configuration and setup" should defer to and depend upon the continued operation of third-party servers

That is, even though the Web browser is an attractive target for its consistency (in behavior and availability), most Web IDE advocates aren't actually leveraging its benefits—they still end up targeting (e.g.) /usr/local/bin/node and /usr/local/python3—except the executables in question are expected to run on some server(s) instead of the contributor's own machine. These browser-based IDEs aren't so browser-based after all, since they're just shelling out to some non-browser process (over RPC over HTTP). The "World Wide Wruntime" is relegated to merely interpreting the code for a thin client that handles its half of the transactions to/from said remote processes, which end up handling the bulk of the computing (even if that computing isn't heavyweight and/or the client code on its own is full of bloat, owing to the modern trends in Web design).

It's sort of crazy how common it is to encounter this "mental slippery slope": "We can lean on the Web browser, since it's available everywhere!" → "That involves offloading it to the cloud (because that's how you 'do' stuff for the browser, right?)".

So: want to see an actual boom in collaborative development spurred by zero-configuration dev environments? The prescription is straightforward: make all these tools truly run in the browser. The experience we should all be shooting for resemble something like this: Step 1: clone the repo Step 2: double click README.html Step 3: you're off to the races—because project upstream has given you all the tools you need to nurture your desire to contribute

You can also watch this space for more examples of the need for an alternative take on working to actually manage to achieve the promise of increased collaboration through friction-free (or at least friction-reduced) development: * https://hypothes.is/search?q=%22the+repo+is+the+IDE%22 * https://hypothes.is/search?q=%22builds+and+burdens%22

A lot of these ideas are junk. This one, though, is achievable. triplescripts.org.

Also, this would be a good trick to use to realize "README.html":

If folks were really committed to improving the developer experience, [...] development would work like this: ¶1. Download the project source tree ¶2. Open README.html ¶3. Drag and drop the project source onto README.html

This is also a ripe place for the toolbench pattern to manifest.

The README can both appear to take care of the ABCs and also act as the entry point to any other shell stowed away in the project. For example, in atticus.js, the README contains a line that says to run the tests "use tests/harness.app.htm on the project repo". We could kick off the build process, open up Contribute.app.htm, squirt the contents of README.txt.htm over there, and then display that to the user, making that region "live" (so actually getting to the test runner and running the tests is even easier).

This news item was submitted only 17 days ago, and yet it's already returning a 404. This is a casualty of the "our code host's presentation of our repo is our website".

As of this writing (i.e. commit fb662ab0), the working link is https://github.com/gitpod-io/openvscode-server/blob/docs/sourcedive.snb.md.

There's a lot of cruft here. Consider that while a project might have a prominently named file like "README" that is meant to be the first thing a wanderer encounters, the true first encounter is the file listing in the project source tree:

• build/
• config/
• src/
• .babelrc
• .dockerignore
• .editorconfig
• .gitignore
• .stylelintrc
• .travis.yml
• Dockerfile
• Gruntfile.js
• LICENSE
• Procfile
• README.md
• aldine.sublime-project
• aldine.sublime-workspace
• circle.yml
• package.json
• tsconfig.json
• tslint.json
• yarn.lock

Imagine a commit (or a pull request) with the summary "Remove cruft". Why might it be rejected? Let's get more specific.

There's a Dockerfile here. There's also a package.json. We can ask of each of these, "Why is this here?" The answer is, "Because someone found them useful." Consider, then, that here's a strong case for a contrib/ directory† for this project and where these things should be kept, ill-conceived tooling conventions notwithstanding.

† This link points to a particular blog post that explains the purpose of a contrib/ directory, but this is not an endorsement of Mr DeVault's other positions or demeanor. Ignore any stridence, arrogance, or other obnoxiousness that you might encounter in your pursuit to pull at any threads from that corner of the Web.

I've done absolutely no actual work in this part, but this is what the third part (the C) in the "ABCs of triple scripts" is supposed to be about.