Secure and Productive Software Development During a Work From Home Mandate

John Andrew Entwistle

 on March 13th, 2020

As COVID-19 continues to spread and impact communities, many organizations are implementing remote work policies to protect their employees. The development community and our customers have come to us looking to leverage Coder during a work from home mandate, particularly within regulated enterprises. We are committed to ensuring our customers are able to continue pushing technological boundaries whether they’re working from the office or anywhere in the world.

Software engineers working in organizations impacted by unexpected business disruptions need to go through a significant amount of effort to get their home environment into the same state as their work environment. The process of installing programming languages, testing frameworks, development utilities, and other tooling is time-consuming, error-prone, and dependent on the underlying machine’s operating system. Time spent setting up this environment can slow down a project’s trajectory and cause development environment drift between team members.

Engineers working in a regulated industry or on sensitive code and data sets may have to put their project on hold until the disruption is resolved. In their case, they’re not allowed to work on the project outside of the organization’s internal infrastructure and network. This is the case for many of our customers.

Coder was built to power and secure an organization’s development environments, including operating in an air-gapped configuration. Engineers using Coder can access their development environments on any machine, all through their browser. This remote access provides a consistent and preconfigured environment no matter what endpoint machine is used to access it.

Development environments on Coder are run on the organization’s secure internal infrastructure and accessed through the standard network and security policies in place across the organization. Centralizing development environments provides visibility and insight into potential security threats, allows updates and patches to be rolled out across the development organization, and ensures that intellectual property isn’t stored on local endpoints. This enables engineers to work on sensitive source code and data sets, without requiring that the intellectual property leave the organization’s protected network.

Coder works with any version control provider, your existing CI, and any internal tools your organization may need to be productive.

• Git — GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket
• Editor — VSCode, Intellij, PyCharm, Eclipse, Jupyter Notebooks, and more.
• Kubernetes Infrastructure — Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, on-premises and more

This is a challenging time for engineers and organizations across the globe. We are here to help our customers and engineers do their jobs in good times and bad.