Being a developer, or becoming a developer, one of the most time-consuming tasks is to set up your development environment.

You had to install different packages and fiddle with apt-get, npm or pip. You had to debug and fix weird issues on Windows, Linux or even Mac, when it comes to installations and configurations.

You must have your own machine or laptop to code. You can't just borrow a computer from someone and start coding. Or, can you?

Yes, you can! Introducing GitHub Codespaces.

Code instantly, anywhere, on any kind of computer

Imagine these scenarios:

• Walk into an Apple store, and start coding on your Rails project
• Borrow your friend's laptop, and start coding on your NodeJS project
• Use Chromebook, and start coding on your machine learning project on Chrome

These are all possible now with GitHub Codespaces!

Codespaces is easy to use

Right now, Codespaces are available to teams and enterprises, but as an individual, you can easily bypass this!

Simply create a free organization belonging to your personal account on GitHub.

And, all the repositories inside this new organization will have access to Codespaces.

You can fork repositories into your organization.

Click on Code -> Codespaces -> Create codespace on main

And, voila! You are ready to code!

Codespaces work natively on VSCode

Your project is now living on the cloud, but you are coding on VSCode just like before.

You can access your Codespace on VSCode with a click of a button on Github.

Codespaces work on Chrome!

You can access your Codespace on Chrome itself!

In this case, you don't even need to install VSCode.

Codespaces is cheap

The cheapest machine (2-core CPU, 4GB RAM) on Codespaces is $0.18 per hour.

If you code a full 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, it would cost less than $30 per month.

Codespaces is powerful

The most powerful machine on Codespaces has a 32-core GPU and 64GB of RAM, and it only costs $2.88 per hour.

You can develop on this machine for an hour and then turn it off.

Codespaces is good for pros and great for beginners

It's cheap. You can use a cheap laptop to run compute-intensive codes.

It's super easy to set up. It takes less than 10 seconds to start a Codespace.

It's a controlled environment, so beginners don't have to fiddle with weird bugs.

It's not a toy because the pros use it too.

Codespaces is the future of development environments.