Thomas Hughes

Senior Solutions Architect

As a Solutions Architect and a member of the Customer Success team at Coder, I often am asked by customers to give proof of concepts on various ways to use Coder. Recently, one inquired about the possibility of using <a href="https://www.spyder-ide.org/">Spyder IDE</a> within a Coder workspace.

<h2>Using Spyder with Coder</h2>

<a href="https://www.spyder-ide.org/">Spyder IDE</a> is a free and open source scientific environment written in Python, for Python, and designed by and for scientists, engineers, and data analysts. While Coder natively supports a variety of <a href="https://coder.com/docs/coder/v1.20/workspaces/editors">editors and IDEs in the browser</a> including VS Code, IntelliJ, PyCharm, and other JetBrains IDEs, if a user wanted to use a different IDE, how can they go about that?

In some instances, users run an IDE locally and use Coder’s <a href="https://coder.com/docs/coder/v1.20/cli/file-sync">SSH file sync feature</a>, which allows you to work locally while leveraging Coder for testing, compilation, and so on. In the case of this particular customer, however, the users are restricted to thin clients which makes such a solution less than ideal. 

But there is another way. 

Recently in a Coffee and Coder livestream, we discussed <a href="https://youtu.be/BrZhBJtjkYk?t=837">using VNC in a Coder workspace</a> and later added an <a href="https://coder.com/docs/coder/latest/guides/customization/vnc">official guide</a> to using VNC. Leveraging Coder’s official <a href="https://github.com/cdr/enterprise-images/tree/main/images/vnc">VNC Image</a>, I was able to write my own <a href="https://github.com/IAmHughes/spyder-ide-in-coder">Dockerfile that included Spyder IDE</a> with just a simple three line file.

Workspace created from Coder’s VNC image modified to include Spyder 

Once I imported this custom Docker image into Coder, I was able to spin up a workspace and configure VNC on a dev URL that could be shared with my colleagues. From there, it was simply a matter of launching Spyder and typing some Python code to test the IDE.

Running Spyder through VNC with Coder

Using Coder and VNC in a browser for desktop applications is just one of many use cases we’re discovering for our customers every day. Have an interesting use case for Coder? Let us know about it on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/coderhq">@coderHQ</a>.

Thomas Hughes shows how to run Spyder in a browser using Coder and VNC.

Missing an IDE? Run a desktop IDE in a browser using Coder & VNC 

One of the most frustrating and time-consuming tasks developers face is getting their development environment configured so they can start contributing to a new project. It can take hours, and if you accidentally end up with a different version of Python or Node installed than the one on your production environment you could cause problems throughout the pipeline.

In this video, we walk through the workflow of a developer getting set up with a new project using Coder. In less than 5 minutes, I create a development environment with all of the required project dependencies, a custom amount of compute power, and the tools needed to develop without disruption. I also show how Coder lets you easily share out your work to collaborators. Check it out!

Setting up cloud dev environments in 5 minutes with Coder

If you like what we’re building here at Coder, we’d love to show you how your development teams can bring the power of cloud development into your organization. <a href="https://coder.com/demo">Contact us for a demo</a> or skip the demo and go straight to a <a href="https://coder.com/trial">60-day trial</a>—installable anywhere you run Kubernetes.

A video walk-through of a developer getting set up with a new project using Coder in less than 5 minutes.

Create cloud dev environments in 5 minutes

Create cloud dev environments in 5 minutes with Coder

As a customer success engineer at Coder, I work with customers every day to identify their pain points and how they can solve them with our platform. Recently a customer inquired about the feasibility of using Coder and Blender within their classroom.

<a href="https://www.blender.org/">Blender</a> is a free and open source tool used for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, and more. I’m somewhat familiar with Blender, but the answer to whether or not you could use Coder and Blender together wasn’t immediately obvious. Clearly, because of the lack of a GUI within Coder, it wouldn’t be possible for students to build the models in Coder. But if they built the models locally, would it be possible to render them using Coder, freeing up their local machines during the resource and time-intensive process?

It turns out that Blender has a pretty awesome <a href="https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/advanced/command_line/index.html">CLI tool</a> that supports headless rendering on a remote machine. After a little Googling, I turned up a <a href="https://github.com/nytimes/rd-blender-docker">Blender Docker image</a> from the NY Times.

For reference, when rendering the model on my gaming machine, it took over an hour to complete a single frame. Using Coder, I was able to render all five frames in ~40 minutes. If students tried to render on their own laptops, they would be unusable for anything else for many hours.

Using Coder to render faster with Blender is just one of many use cases we’re discovering for our customers every day. Have an interesting use case for Coder? Let us know about it on Twitter @coderHQ.

Rendering Blender 3D Models Faster with Coder

Thomas Hughes is a Senior Solutions Architect at Coder. Before Coder, he was at GitHub as a Senior DevOps Engineer in Professional Services. In his career, Thom

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Missing an IDE? Run a desktop IDE in a browser using Coder & VNC

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