The Wonderful World of Gitpod

Introduction:

Welcome back to the blog!

This week, I’m touching on a tool that I’ve heard of for a while but never really taken the time to delve into.

If you’ve never heard of this tool before then stay tuned because I’ll be talking about it on a fairly high level as well as sharing my experiences with it.

As always, before we get into the blog post, please make sure to applaud, comment and share with your friends.

Happy Reading!

What is It?

First things first, I’ll leave a link to Gitpod here. As much as I can try and explain things, if you want to go into more detail then check out their website!!!

Quite simply, it’s a platform which allows you to setup a “cloud development environment”. All this means is that your IDE (the place where you code) is delivered over the internet.

How Actually Did I Stumble Across It?

Credit to my friend Lou from OpenUpTheCloud for sharing this tool with me.

I’d literally just seen it pop up on socials and thought “Let’s give this a try”.

Why am I Using it?

I’ve integrated it into my dissertation programming project because it allows you to essentially use an IDE in the browser.

This is perfect for me because I like to switch up my working environment but I would rather not have to carry my laptop everywhere. Essentially I can setup a project on Gitpod and then move to wherever I want to work on it.

I think the screenshot below is the main reason why I’m using Gitpod:

We’ve all been in a situation where we’ve had to switch workstations. This involves unnecessary tasks such as the following:

Reclone the repo.

Check versions of node to ensure the machine’s version is compatible with the project.

Install dependencies.

Make sure .env is up to date.

Possibly having to update local paths.

While none of these are major, they are extra tasks that have to be done.

For the reasons stated above, Gitpod is essentially a back up solution for when I don’t have my laptop. I can just login to their platform and continue my development, wherever I want.

How am I Finding it So Far?

I must say that I’ve only setup my project in Gitpod so far.

With that being said though, everything seems fine. Speed is good. My project works fine in the browser.

In all honestly, I’m probably only using about 5% of Gitpod’s actual capabilities. There seems to be all different integrations with different cloud providers that I have chosen against exploring. The main reason for this is that I don’t actually need them. Maybe in future, I’ll implement it more.

Conclusion:

All in all, it has proven beneficial to implement Gitpod. I’m sure there’ll be a situation where it will ‘save me’ and allow me to continue developing without my laptop.

The only other thing to bare in mind is that I’m on the free tier. This does place limitations on the monthly usage however as stated above, I only intend to use Gitpod when I have to.

Final Things:

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this article!

All my links are here!