Netflix Pair Programming Tool
I was scrolling Twitter when I came across an interesting conversation. A Netflix Engineer talked about a tool she uses to pair-program. It can run in the browser and the code doesn't have to be committed. Once you share the live link, the end user can see your changes in live time, and it allows them to make changes too. In her example, she sent her FE changes to a BE to see if the connections worked, and he was able to troubleshoot her issue. Can any Netflix engineers share if this is a proprietary tool? If so, are there any tools like it? I know VS Code has live share but my team doesn't use VS Code. A browser option, like the one Netflix has, would be great. #engineering #swe #software #netflix #programming
What IDE yall use? jetbrains products have a “code with me” feature with live pair programming but it’s in IDE rather than browser
For the most part we all use visual studio. I an another python programmer use Jupyter when needed.
JetBrains has one. https://www.jetbrains.com/code-with-me/
Microsoft/GitHub codespaces is just vs code in browser (via an azure container and vm) where you can share a link with anyone and work on uncommitted code together without having the ide installed on any local machine. I don’t know if they still have any promotions for x free hours a month, they did a year ago. Might be worth a trial, although commercial use might be a different story and if you’re using let’s say GitLab or something, being stuck with GitHub is not convenient/likely not allowed for proprietary code. GitHub has partnered with some big companies to push this product offering, not sure if Netflix is on that list. Eclipse Che is in the same space (Kubernetes based ide) and open source but when I looked into it a year ago, the documentation was not the best (the norm for most OSS). Redhat/IBM has some stake in Che and uses it for their commercial offering - “workspaces”.
It’s most likely vscode. You can run that in the browser as well
That’s in-house tooling. It needs Netflix-like infra to work. The closest thing that solves the same problem is ngrok. It works very differently, but does help you do that.
You mean like eclipse che which has existed for years.
That's new to me. Thanks for the tip.