When Technology Fails, GitHub Codespaces Saves the Day
Last week, I spoke at the Copenhagen Developers Festival about using GitHub Codespaces for cloud-based development. This is an amazing conference with an incredible lineup. I’ve done this talk plenty of times, sharing how flexible and convenient cloud development environments can be. But this time, things didn’t go as planned.
I arrived early, as usual, to set up and greet attendees. When I tried to connect my laptop to the screen, though, nothing appeared. It wasn’t a simple projector issue either; the recording equipment was more complicated than I expected. I had two adapters with me, and the conference staff handed me two more, but none of them worked. I rebooted, resized my display, tried everything I could think of—still nothing.
By now, I was a few minutes into my time slot, and the presentation seemed in jeopardy. I borrowed a local laptop, only to discover it was in Danish. Cue the comedy of errors! Finding the * for my password and the / for URLs was a nightmare. I ended up copying and pasting the / multiple times just to get around. Hopefully, the audience found it more amusing than I did.
Despite the keyboard struggles, I managed to pull it off. I used the browser to present my slides, which are hosted on GitHub Pages at http://chris-ayers.com/dev-containers. We discussed the Dev Containers spec, hosted at containers.dev. Then, I launched GitHub Codespaces using my repository https://github.com/codebytes/dev-containers and a few others (cpython and Home Assistant) to demonstrate its capabilities.
What could have been a total disaster turned into a great example of how powerful and resilient modern development tools are. GitHub Codespaces didn’t just save my presentation; it became the star of the show, proving that with the right tools, we can roll with the punches and keep going.
So, the next time technology decides not to cooperate, just remember—if your work’s in the cloud, you’re always just a few clicks away from getting back on track.
