Ammar Bandukwala

Co-founder & CEO

<p>TL;DR:</p>

<ul>
<li>Coder adopted <a href="https://github.com/nhooyr/websocket">nhooyr/websocket</a> and will continue to maintain it as an open-source library in <a href="https://github.com/coder/">our own GitHub organization</a>.</li>
<li>websocket will stay permissively licensed and cater to a broad user base, not just Coder. No breaking API changes are planned, except for updating the import path to <code>github.com/coder/websocket</code>.

<ul>
<li>If you find this disruptive, you may continue using the <code>nhooyr.io/websocket</code> import path as it&#39;s quite complete for most use cases.</li>
</ul></li>
<li>We welcome contributions in the form of issues and PRs <a href="https://github.com/coder/websocket">here</a>.</li>
</ul>


<p>nhooyr/websocket is a minimal, idiomatic, and performant WebSocket library for Go. Its quality is proven by <a href="https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/net/websocket">an official recommendation by the Go Authors</a> and a long list of dependents including <a href="https://github.com/traefik/traefik">Traefik</a>, <a href="https://github.com/hashicorp/vault">Vault</a>, and <a href="https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared">Cloudflare</a>.</p>

<p>For library users, we do not plan on making any breaking API changes. The project’s high level goals remain the same, and we will focus our development efforts on bug fixes and performance improvements.</p>

<p>In the post-xz world, supply chain security and open source sustainability is top of mind for many of us. We believe that governance changes in popular libraries should be clearly explained.</p>


<h1>A Note From nhooyr, Library Author</h1>

<p>The concept for nhooyr.io/websocket came to me when I was working at Coder in 2018 on their collaborative cloud editor. I had implemented an operational transformation websocket protocol in Go with <a href="https://github.com/gorilla/websocket/">gorilla/websocket</a>.</p>

<p>It worked but I was not a fan of gorilla&#39;s API surface nor the callback approach for receiving pongs. I had much spare time back then and those two minor issues gave me the impetus to build a library suited to my minimal tastes.</p>

<p>I want to be clear though that I very much appreciate and respect the incredible impact the Gorilla project has had and continues to have on the Go community. ⁠Maintaining high quality open-source software for years without compensation is not easy.</p>

<p>I began work in March 2019. Coder even let me work on it after hours in their Austin, Texas office. I released v1 in June 2019. It had an excellent debut on <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19766261">hackernews</a>. I&#39;ve since added many more features and fixed many, many embarrassing bugs.</p>

<p>But alas it has been 5 years and it is now 2024. It will be clear to anyone paying attention to the issue tracker that I haven&#39;t been able to keep up despite my best efforts. My life, dreams and ambitions are very different than they were in 2019. I still deeply enjoy software but there is much else to life that I have also come to enjoy and wish to first develop mastery over.</p>

<p>One day many years from now I will return but right now I must let go.</p>

<p>To that end I am happy to hand the reins for nhooyr.io/websocket to Coder. I&#39;ve known the founders and engineers at Coder for a very long time. I fully trust them to preserve the minimal and idiomatic nature of my library.</p>

<p><br/>
Sincerely,
nhooyr</p>


<h1>A Note From Ammar, Coder Co-Founder and CTO</h1>

<p>We dedicate a small portion of our engineering resources to building and maintaining libraries with zero intrinsic commercial value. We see this open source work as good for the community, good for business, and plain fun. </p>

<p>As our projects become popular, they translate into new customers and more talented developers in our team. So, websocket will continue to be permissively licensed and designed with the needs of the broader user base (not Coder) in mind. We see the drivers of this library’s success as stability, reliability, and performance in that order.</p>

<p>We are grateful for nhooyr’s trust and are honored to serve the Go community. We welcome contributions in the form of issues and PRs <a href="https://github.com/coder/websocket">here</a>. </p>

<p>— Ammar</p>


Coder adopted nhooyr/websocket and will continue to maintain it as an open-source library in our own GitHub organization.

A New Home for nhooyr/websocket

<p><a href="https://jfrog.com/artifactory/">JFrog Artifactory</a> is a tool for securing and distributing binary artifacts. It’s used by the world’s largest enterprises to vet external dependencies as they enter development environments and vet internal builds as they move from dev to staging to production.</p>


<p><em>List of repository types supported by Artifactory.</em></p>


<p>Through the expressiveness of <a href="https://coder.com/docs/v2/latest/templates">Coder Templates</a>, platform teams can now ensure that all development dependencies originate from Artifactory. You can find a full example template <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder/tree/main/examples/templates/jfrog/docker">here</a> and nitty-gritty details on how to set up the integration <a href="https://coder.com/docs/v2/latest/platforms/jfrog">here</a>.</p>

<p>Broadly, the integration involves setting up Artifactory repositories for each type of secured dependency:</p>


<p>Then, using Coder Templates with the Artifactory to automatically provision a scoped token for each workspace:</p>


<p>Next, configure package managers in the <strong><span style="color: red;">coder_agent</span></strong> ’s script:</p>


<p>Then, push the template up to Coder and developers have an experience whereby the workspaces they create automatically pull dependencies from Artifactory:</p>


<p>And done. Developers now have an environment where they can securely install dependencies using standard methods. This is a prime example of Coder’s vision of making secure development transparent and painless.</p>


<h1>VS Code Extensions</h1>

<p>IDE extensions are an emerging threat to development environments. There are few resources for running private extension registries due to their proprietary nature. As an aside to our development of <a href="https://github.com/coder/code-server">code-server</a>, we released <a href="https://github.com/coder/code-marketplace">code-marketplace</a> so that teams can run internal (even air-gapped) marketplaces.</p>

<p>code-marketplace has <a href="https://github.com/coder/code-marketplace#artifactory-storage">first-class support for Artifactory</a>, and we’ve seen good adoption of the tool in the enterprise.</p>


<h1>In Closing</h1>

<p>The integration between JFrog Artifactory and Coder represents a significant advancement in secure and efficient software development. By leveraging Artifactory&#39;s capabilities for binary artifact management along with Coder&#39;s automated workspace provisioning, development teams can establish a secure, streamlined workflow.</p>

<p>To learn more about our integration, check out Jfrog’s Co-founder and CTO, Yoav Landman showcasing how effortlessly Coder integrates with Jfrog in just a single click. </p>


swampUP 2023: The Complete SSC Platform by Yoav Landman | CTO & Co-founder, JFrog

This blog explains the the integration between JFrog Artifactory and Coder as it represents a significant advancement in secure and efficient software development. By leveraging Artifactory's capabilities for binary artifact management along with Coder's automated workspace provisioning, development teams can establish a secure, streamlined workflow.

Seamless Security with Artifactory and Coder

<p>On August 10th, <a href="https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-source-license">HashiCorp announced that future versions of their products will be licensed under BSL instead of MPL</a>. They addressed FAQs <a href="https://www.hashicorp.com/license-faq">here</a>.</p>

<p>For Coder, <a href="https://www.hashicorp.com/license-faq#What-are-the-usage-limitations-for-HashiCorp&#x27;s-products-under-BSL">FAQ#10</a> has the most relevant language:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>All non-production uses are permitted. All production uses are allowed other than hosting or embedding the software in an offering competitive with HashiCorp products or services.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>We do not compete with a HashiCorp product, so we&#39;re compliant and will not change our roadmap or business in light of this news.</p>

<p>We have a good relationship with HashiCorp and hope to continue building amazing products together.</p>

<p>If you have any more questions, please reach out to <a href="mailto:contact@coder.com">contact@coder.com</a>.</p>


<p>This blog post is not legal advice.</p>


deer river

HashiCorp's new license and Coder

<p>As software projects scale, so does developer time spent fiddling with environments and waiting on tests and builds. Developers who work in large, mature companies are awfully familiar with these problems. Some of the enterprises we&#39;ve spoken with take weeks to onboard a new development environment, hours to clone their repository, and 30 minutes to produce a development build. </p>

<p>Bleeding edge organizations like <a href="https://blog.palantir.com/the-benefits-of-remote-ephemeral-workspaces-1a1251ed6e53">Palantir</a>, <a href="https://slack.engineering/development-environments-at-slack/#:%7E:text=At%20Slack%2C%20we%20develop%20remotely,t%20require%20an%20internet%20connection.">Slack</a>, and <a href="https://www.infoq.com/presentations/stripe-dev-env-infrastructure/">Stripe</a> have largely solved these problems by shifting their development environments to cloud servers that automate configuration and offer immense computing power. But, most companies that could benefit from remote development struggle to dedicate the engineering resources required to build an internal platform.</p>

<p>Coder was founded five years ago to standardize remote development. In 2021, our v1 began making serious headway in the enterprise, revolutionizing software development in some of the world&#39;s largest banks, software companies, and public sector organizations. But, due to our container-based model, we couldn&#39;t explain how <em>every</em> software engineer in an organization would switch to Coder, so most opted to stick with local development instead of bifurcating their teams across two workflows.</p>

<p>See, Coder v1 and similar tools dictate that a development environment is either a container, VM, or group of packages. It&#39;s all of the above and more. We quickly learned that to realize our vision, we must adopt a new core tenet.</p>

<blockquote>
<p>A development environment is a set of cloud resources namespaced to a single developer.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>This tenet and our years of market discovery have culminated in the open-source release of <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder">Coder v2</a>. </p>

<p>Now, we leverage Terraform to support every type of computing, whether that’s Windows VMs on Azure, Macs on AWS, or Linux Containers on Docker. With Terraform&#39;s thousands of resources, one can provision load balancers, buckets, security groups, secrets, etc. in their workspace.</p>


<p>Our users self-install Coder onto their clouds, so they don&#39;t pay Coder a premium on compute or worry about our access to sensitive information. Coder doesn&#39;t require network infrastructure setup since we transparently leverage Tailscale to connect local machines with Coder environments. Developers have two ways to access their environments:</p>

<ol>
<li>Via the <code>coder</code> CLI, developers can use SSH and port-forwarding with familiar local tools such as Visual Studio Code Remote SSH, Emacs or VIM</li>
<li>Via the web dashboard, developers can use <a href="https://github.com/coder/code-server"><code>code-server</code></a>, JupyterLab, and other web applications</li>
</ol>

<p>To set up Coder, an administrator first writes a Terraform template that describes each workspace’s cloud resources.</p>

<pre><code class="hcl">resource &quot;aws_instance&quot; &quot;dev&quot; {
  ami               = data.aws_ami.ubuntu.id
  availability_zone = &quot;${var.region}a&quot;
  instance_type     = var.instance_type

  user_data = data.coder_workspace.me.transition == &quot;start&quot; ? local.user_data_start : local.user_data_end
  tags = {
    Name = &quot;coder-${data.coder_workspace.me.owner}-${data.coder_workspace.me.name}&quot;
  }
}
</code></pre>


<p>Then, a developer spins up their workspace.</p>


<p>Last, the developer connects and begins coding.</p>


<p>There’s much more to be done, especially around IDE support, cost management, and, of course, airplane Wi-Fi. But, we’re incredibly excited to share our tool with the world because we believe it’s the next step in realizing remote development.</p>

<p>If you’re interested in learning more, check out <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder#coder">our repo</a> or <a href="https://coder.com/docs/coder-oss/latest/install">install</a>.</p>

<p>— Ammar Bandukwala, Co-founder &amp; CEO</p>


A software development environment is not a container

<p>September was a busy month for us. Find a detailed changelog in <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder/releases">our GitHub</a>.</p>


<h1>Port Forward from Dashboard</h1>

<p>You can now access web applications running within your workspace through the dashboard. Go to the workspace page, enter the port, press &quot;Open URL&quot;, and the Coder will launch you into your application. See <a href="https://coder.com/docs/coder-oss/latest/networking/port-forwarding#dashboard">the docs</a> for more info.</p>


<h1>Activity-Based Auto Stop</h1>

<p>Gone are the days of your workspace shutting down while banging out code.</p>

<p>Now, when we detect workspace connection activity, we bump the auto-stop timer an hour. IDE, SSH, Port Forwarding, and app activity trigger this bump.</p>


<h1>Workspace Quotas</h1>

<p>This feature is available in our <a href="https://coder.com/docs/coder-oss/latest/admin/enterprise">Enterprise Edition</a>.</p>

<p>Admins may <a href="https://coder.com/docs/coder-oss/latest/admin/quotas">define quotas at the deployment level</a> to protect against Denial-of-Service, control costs, and ensure equitable access to cloud resources.</p>


<h1>Last Seen At</h1>

<p>The Users page now shows when each user was last online. This information helps admins minimize cloud costs and measure internal Coder engagement.</p>


<h1>Audit Logs</h1>

<p>Enterprise deployments now track all user operations. Auditors can review these operations through the dashboard or the CLI. <a href="https://coder.com/docs/coder-oss/latest/admin/audit-logs">Learn more in our docs.</a></p>


<h1>Notable mentions</h1>

<ul>
<li>Admins can now create workspaces on behalf of other users</li>
<li>The Workspace page will show Apps in a loading state until they come online</li>
<li>A bunch of connection stability improvements

<ul>
<li>We have completed our transition to Tailscale/WireGuard-based networking</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>


<h1>Next steps</h1>

<p><a href="https://coder.com/docs/coder-oss/latest/install">Install</a>, <a href="https://coder.com/docs/coder-oss/latest/admin/upgrade">upgrade</a> or <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder">view our repo</a></p>


Activity-based auto stop, workspace quotas, and over 100 other improvements.

What's New in September 2022

<p>Here are all the cool features we released during the month of August. Find a more detailed changelog in <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder/releases">our GitHub releases</a>.</p>


<h1>Template Metrics</h1>

<p>Each template now has DAU metrics visible on the Template page. To ensure accuracy, activity is only recorded on workspace connections.</p>


<h1>Last Used</h1>

<p>All workspaces now have a “Last Used” column, helping admins and users clean up unused resources.</p>


<h1>Resource Metadata</h1>

<p>Templates may now expose arbitrary metadata, including resourcing, network addresses and runtime information. Mark variables as secret to expose workspace-scoped passwords and keys. <a href="https://coder.com/docs/coder-oss/latest/templates/resource-metadata">Learn more in our docs.</a></p>


<h1>Template Icons</h1>

<p>Template admins may define icons to liven up the dashboard experience.</p>


<h1>User Avatars</h1>

<p>In a similar vein to template icons, Coder now loads avatars from GitHub and OIDC during login.</p>


<h1>User Roles</h1>

<p>Coder now offers these user roles:</p>


<h2>And more...</h2>

<ul>
<li>A ton of bugfixes</li>
<li>Experimental Tailscale networking support</li>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/docs/coder-oss/latest/install#kubernetes-via-helm">Kubernetes Helm chart</a></li>
</ul>

<p>Find a complete changelog in our <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder/releases">GitHub Releases</a> page.</p>

<p>Next, check out our <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder">repo</a> or <a href="https://coder.com/docs/coder-oss/latest/install">install Coder</a>.</p>


What's New in August 2022

<p>Many organizations use streaming-based remote desktops to enhance security and simplify workstation management. These solutions introduce typing latency that hampers engineers, leaving technical leadership with a dilemma: unhappy engineers or risky software development.</p>

<p>Coder centralizes developer workspaces onto your infrastructure, offering the security and management benefits of remote desktops. We directly integrate with popular IDEs, making latency imperceptible even though all the work is happening in a remote environment.</p>


Coder dashboard and open editor

<h2>Remote workspaces are <em>better</em> for engineers</h2>

<p>Remote workspaces take advantage of powerful server resources. Our customers spend less time waiting and more time creating.</p>


htop on a powerful Coder workspace

<p>Coder workspaces are updated in lockstep, so there&#39;s no more “it works on my machine”.</p>


<p>Eliminate waiting and breaking, stay in flow, and code at the speed of thought.</p>


<h2>Dig deeper</h2>

<ul>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/blog/coder-better-vdi-alternative-for-developers">A comprehensive Coder vs. VDI comparison</a></li>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/docs/coder/latest">Read the docs</a></li>
</ul>

<h2>See for yourself</h2>

<p>To learn more about how Coder can improve your developer experience, <a href="https://coder.com/demo">request a demo</a> or <a href="https://coder.com/trial">begin a trial</a>.</p>


Many organizations use remote desktops to enhance security and simplify desktop management. Streaming-based solutions introduce typing latency that sucks for engineers. Technical leadership is left with a dilemma: unhappy engineers or risky software development.

Remote desktop for engineers

Zero-Latency Remote Desktops for Developers

<p>Developers spend a lot of time with their editors/IDEs, and develop strong allegiances to them. They are more than just another app; they are integral to bringing visions to reality. Despite their importance to developers, or perhaps <em>because</em> of their significance, the fundamental architecture of popular IDEs has stayed the same.</p>

<p>In this post, we will look at early attempts to move software development to the cloud and examine why they weren&#39;t successful. From there, we will identify lessons learned from these projects and what it takes to successfully enable development in the cloud. </p>

<h3>A brief timeline of IDE evolution: From local configuration to cloud-based collaboration</h3>

<p>For the last 30 years, writing software has typically been done locally. IDEs are built to be installed and configured on individual machines. </p>

<p>Recently, there have been efforts to bring the IDE into the cloud, where development tools and resources are hosted remotely and accessible through the web browser. These new IDEs promised zero environment configuration, scalable computing, and native collaboration — all features that, on the surface, should be highly desirable. </p>

<p>Despite delivering on their promises, none of the cloud-based IDEs were able to displace the local IDE as the preferred environment for most developers. A recent <a href="https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2021/team-tools/">JetBrains study</a> found that only 10% of professional developers used cloud-based editors or IDEs regularly.</p>

<h2>Major roadblocks for cloud-based IDE adoption</h2>

<p>What’s stopping people from adopting cloud IDEs? Here’s what we’ve learned so far from our own efforts building one.</p>

<h3>Inertia: The problem with building an IDE from scratch</h3>

<p>While the benefits of cloud development are clear, creating a great IDE is difficult. The IDE does many things very well, each thing seamlessly integrated into the other to create an experience of sustained flow. It takes a team of skilled engineers many, many years to build something like IntelliJ or VS Code.</p>

<h3>Cloud9 &amp; Codeanywhere</h3>

<p>Two of the most popular cloud IDE attempts were Cloud9 and Codeanywhere. Both attempted to rewrite the IDE, implementing features like autocomplete, tabbing, and debugging from scratch.</p>

<p>A simple google search about either will show that users considered both to be for “lightweight” development. The developer experience simply didn’t match that of a traditional IDE. They attracted small levels of usage from new developers and those working on small projects. </p>

<h3>Adapting to the cloud-based form</h3>

<p>If we take a look at the SaaS model, we realize most SaaS applications do a few things very well, solving a very specific problem for customers. IDEs, on the other hand, are less of an “app” and are more comparable to an operating system for writing code. Almost any kind of experience can be built on top of an IDE. </p>

<p>At Coder, we recognized the mistake of creating a web-based IDE from scratch. Instead, we set out to evolve an existing IDE to this cloud form. Our thinking was that we could piggyback on the existing inertia and focus our development efforts on just the client/server connection. The result was the Coder Cloud IDE, launched in October of 2018. It offered a fully-featured VS Code experience running in the cloud, on our servers, for free.</p>


The Coder Cloud IDE running on Coder.com

<p>We saw a great deal of casual usage, but like our predecessors, no one was using the IDE in a full time professional setting. In January of 2019, we came to the conclusion that <strong>control</strong> was the missing link for success in this space.</p>

<h3>Control: Giving developers authority over their IDE environment</h3>

<p>Most professional developers regularly access services and resources hosted in their organization&#39;s cloud or on-premises. Running their IDE in our cloud simply made that more difficult. What if the development environment could be installed on their own infrastructure?</p>

<p>Giving developers control to run environments on <em>their own cloud</em> made it possible to apply their cloud credits and access internal resources at incredible speeds! Developers could provision their environments to be any size with granular control over the CPU cores, RAM, memory, storage, and even GPUs! </p>

<h4>Open-sourcing the cloud-IDE experience</h4>

<p>Having learned this, we released <a href="https://github.com/coder/code-server">code-server</a>, our open source cloud IDE experience. </p>

<p>Code-server allows developers to install VS Code on any machine and access it remotely through the browser. Millions of developers use code-server for cloud development on everything from Raspberry Pis to automated Kubernetes clusters that provision new environments for every developer on a team. </p>


Code-server lets developers access their development environment remotely

<p>And people loved it! Today, code-server has tens of thousands of GitHub stars. It has become the standard for full-time, professional cloud IDE developers. </p>

<h2>Looking Forward: Cloud-Based IDEs with Coder</h2>

<p>Now, we’re taking these lessons and applying them as we build Coder, a platform that makes cloud development practical and feasible for software teams. As a company founded by developers, we are building the platform with a control-first approach, ensuring developers can continue to use their preferred tooling, consistent with our philosophy that <a href="https://coder.com/blog/the-future-of-cloud-development-is-editor-neutral">the future of cloud development is editor neutral</a>.</p>

<p>If you would like to learn more about how Coder empowers cloud-based development, <a href="https://coder.com/demo">schedule a demo</a>.</p>


Learn the history of cloud-based IDEs & cloud development, and how it has evolved to support professional development.

Evolution of the cloud-based IDE

<p>Coder’s objective with <a href="https://sail.dev/">Sail</a> is to accelerate workflow through the orchestration of the development environment. Two months ago, we released <a href="https://github.com/cdr/code-server">code-server</a>. Code-server separates Visual Studio Code’s frontend and backend so you could use VS Code on a remote server. To date we’ve amassed over 19k GitHub stars and 1.4 million docker pulls, validating our vision for the future of development.</p>

<p>Today we release <a href="https://sail.dev/">Sail</a>. A universal workflow for reproducible, project-defined development environments. Sail allows projects to define their own development environment via a single Dockerfile. With Sail, <strong>projects can be opened in a dedicated environment right from GitHub or GitLab</strong>. It eliminates the “It worked on my machine” problem. Sail environments run code-server, providing an experience that feels local, but dedicated to the project at hand. More supported editors are just around the corner. <strong>Stop setting up environments, share workflow improvements, and collaborate not only on code, but on how the code is written.</strong></p>


<p><a href="https://sail.dev/docs/installation/">Install it now</a>, or check out  <a href="https://github.com/cdr/sail">the GitHub</a>.</p>


Sail is an open source universal standard that allows projects to define their own development environment via a single Dockerfile

AI-native Development

Secure Environments for 2,500+ Developers

Ammar Bandukwala

Explore the latest from Ammar

A New Home for nhooyr/websocket

Seamless Security with Artifactory and Coder

HashiCorp's new license and Coder

A software development environment is not a container

What's New in September 2022

What's New in August 2022

Zero-Latency Remote Desktops for Developers

Evolution of the cloud-based IDE

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