Online coding environment with Gitpod

Over the last few months I've made my hosting environment entirely serverless thanks to the help of GitHub, Forrestry and Netlify. Next, I wanted a cloud based development environment, so if I wasn't at my laptop and wanted to make a change, I could.

There were quite a few options, but the two that seemed to fit the bill for me were GitPod and GitHub Codespaces. The latter is not yet available to the general public. Whilst I did register for access, it's not yet been granted. That left me with GitPod. So I signed up, pointed it at my preview branch on GitHub, added a few config settings and I was done. I had a fully fledged development environment in the cloud, including full preview functionality. The IDE is basically Visual Studio Code in the browser. It is true that coding in a browser is not quite as user friendly as in a dedicated desktop app, but it's still very much manageable for me. I don't code that much, most of it is tinkering with existing code.

So now I have both my hosting and development environment fully in the cloud. The cost of all this? Surely all these services must cost something. Well, for my basic needs the monthly cost is zero. Nothing, zilch, nada!