Collaborationįor this, Duolingo turned to Tailscale, a VPN for DevOps and infrastructure teams wanting to collaborate securely.įor engineering teams needing secure access to dynamic hosts, services and applications, VPNs are the answer. But we needed a similar solution for Codespaces. Chaidarun says:Ī lot of our development environment we don't have to expose to the world, it's behind a firewall, which was our old L2 VPN. However, the Codespaces deployment introduced a new requirement, as there's no way for it to get behind Duolingo’s firewall to access the private resources needed for development. It's also more consistent as the online environment is generated the same way from the same templates for everybody, as opposed to local instances where you rely on developers following instructions correctly. Codespaces made it easier and quicker to set up the development environment and be ready to code within a few minutes. In simple terms, it’s the same as the difference between local Microsoft Word where you’re tied to a particular physical device, and Google Docs, which you can connect from any laptop.ĭuolingo started using GitHub Codespaces around a year ago, which allowed its engineers to carry out their work in the cloud. The way a remote software engineer works is, the editor is online.

They write it on their laptop, and then we push it to some repository, like GitHub. Normally, software engineers write code that runs on their laptop. As Art Chaidarun, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Duolingo, explains: There were a few problems with this approach.įirstly, when new developers joined the business, the amount of time taken to get them set up and ready to code second, the ability to work and collaborate in the cloud. Since language learning app Duolingo launched back in 2012, all its coding was done locally on engineer laptops or desktops.

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