I'm afraid of dev containers

When I first encountered GitHub codespaces, GitPod and more I was amazed. This could significantly improve my productivity and 10 times that for teams.

But here’s the thing. 10 years ago would my family be able to afford a $.3/hour bill to indulge a ‘hobby’ while we were barely surviving, barely able to even afford generic medication (And those are not held to a high standard here)

I learned English by talking to other people on the internet and playing video games. I made a lot of friends playing very laggy GTA San Andreas on SA-MP even though I had to set every display setting to the lowest. I learned to code with the very first run of Udacity’s CS101. Code that I was executing on my old Pentium 3 processor (Later upgraded to the Pentium 4, I was ecstatic) back in 2012 when the core i3/i5/i7 were the cool kids and the core 2 duo was on the way out. But that was because that was the best desktop we could afford.

But with very fast internet there is now a trend to code in the cloud, a trend that in all fairness is natural and great from a security and deployment/onboarding point of view. But what about 14 year old me, and the billions like me in developing countries? Can we afford dev containers?

If heavy duty CAD/Rendering is moving to the cloud (With subscriptions/pay as you go), coding moves to dev containers and gives people with a $10/mo AI assistant a massive edge, running tests instantly across on-demand servers and more, is a door to elevating yourself out of poverty being shut? The only reason I could afford these tools today is because I was listening to Sebastian Thrun, Peter Norvig and David J. Melan, following along by running code in IDLE and finishing EdX assignments that ran slow, but they ran.

But with everything getting more resource intensive (Which does make life easier for devs), would a 10 year old computer today be good enough to learn development at a similar level to the rich neighbour’s core i7?

And I’m not just talking about coding. There’s already cloud processing for editing video files thanks to high speed internet. Pay as you go usually rather than using your uncle’s computer to learn editing while he’s at work.

I believe that if we keep moving everything to the cloud, that’s great for those that benefit from it. But if that happens, future computers become thin-clients. Fantastic battery life and lighter than any current model, perhaps even much cheaper. And a credit card bill with a dozen small subscriptions for a hobbyist.

And is anybody going to be interested in making mid range chips whose latest version the poor can’t afford and the rich prefer thin clients?

And those who never had a credit score, are the first generation in their family to have a bank account with $300 of savings in total? They’re screwed. The path to exiting poverty thanks to the proliferation of the internet is unintentionally being paywalled.

There are billions of us who might one day not even be able to run docker-compose for an open source project on an old computer. And I am afraid of such a future..

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