DEV Community: ioana

Inside the Box: First Big Community Update of 2024

ioana — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 08:18:34 +0000

Hello! Is there anybody out there? 👋

We know it's been a while since the last newsletter but we've been busy bees during the last two months! The good news is that sharing so many great things in this one makes it even more exciting. A big release, a lot of new features and everything in between!

Let's discover what we baked since our last newsletter!

Latest Product News

CodeSandbox CDE ☁️ — In our biggest launch since v1, in January we released CodeSandbox CDE, the cloud development experience we've been building for over 2 years (which started with "Projects" in 2022).

In a nutshell, CodeSandbox CDE brings dedicated cloud environments for every branch & PR that spin up in 2 seconds and are available and collaborative 24/7.

Usage-based billing & plan updates 🪙 With the launch of CodeSandbox CDE, we updated our plans and billing model to meet the needs of cloud development. We've brought nearly all our Pro features to the Free plan and introduced usage-based billing, so Pro workspaces will be billed for what they use instead of how many people exist in the workspace.

VM tiers & usage monitoring ⚡ — You can now choose the VM specs that run your Devboxes and repositories. There are six tiers to choose from: you can go up to 4 vCPUs + 8 GB RAM in Free, 16 vCPUs + 32 GB RAM in Pro, and 64 vCPUs + 128 GB RAM in Enterprise. We also introduced a VM Settings page where you can monitor and control VM usage.

Live sessions in Devboxes 📺 — You can now run live coding sessions right from your browser, powered by our VMs, both in Free and Pro plans. A live session allows you to start a live collaborative coding session with others, which is especially useful for education, interviews and hackathons.

AI autocomplete in Sandboxes 🤖 — Many of our users have asked for autocomplete features similar to those offered by Copilot. So, we have extended our Codeium integration to Sandboxes. Users in our Free plan get 100 Codeium insertions in their code per month, and users in Pro get unlimited.

Unified Platform 🚀 — Probably our biggest launch of 2023, our Unified Platform introduced Devboxes (instant cloud environments running in our VM infrastructure) and brought the biggest overhaul to Sandboxes in 5 years. Watch the AMA live stream with the team for all the details.

Full Changelog 📜 — As we mentioned, we shipped many things recently. Be sure to check the latest changelog and the updates from December. And don't miss the changelog walkthrough video with our Head of Product, Neco.

Meet Us @ Events

Developer Onboarding - Before and After CDEs — Developer onboarding... is not great. However, cloud development environments seek to make onboarding much easier and faster: down from days to hours. In this live stream, Christian Alfoni, Danilo Woznika and Alex Moldovan will show some of the typical pains of getting onboarded as a developer and how CodeSandbox CDE makes it a much better experience. Register here.

DevWorld Conference — Our backend engineer, Sanne, will speak in Amsterdam at DevWorld Conference about "Elixir: Happy Developers and Scaleable Backends". The conference takes place on February 29th & March 1st!

FOSDEM — At the beginning of the month, our Engineering Manager & DevRel, Ioana, moderated a DevRoom at FOSDEM - the largest conference dedicated to Free and Open Source Developers in Europe. Have you been around? What's your favorite devroom there?

Web Bytes

The State of CDEs: post-survey panel — Recently, we surveyed 2200+ software developers and engineering leaders to uncover how CDEs are used today, their main benefits, adoption challenges, and future perspectives. We discussed the key findings from the final report with a panel of founders, engineering leaders, and software developers.

CodeSandbox blog 📰 — We wrote a lot in the last couple of months! A special mention goes to "Are CDEs Coming to Replace Local Development?", "The History of State Management at CodeSandbox", and a unique opinion article by our Co-Founder Ives, "Why I Code in the Cloud".

Live demo: Doing Professional Development in the Cloud — A trio of CodeSandbox engineers took the virtual stage to showcase what it's like to do professional development using a cloud environment. If you didn't catch it live, check out the recording!

Community Spotlight

Each Friday, we try to share on social media some of the projects that our community works on. In this edition, besides the ✨ Community Spotlight ✨ we are highlighting a CodeSandbox Friend too.

Spotlight - Dev Portal Awards — The DX breakthroughs implemented by react.dev, powered by a collaboration with CodeSandbox, won the Dev Portal Award for DX! The React docs also won best API Reference documentation. We couldn't be more proud of this partnership!

CodeSandbox Friends - Preact — Preact is a fantastic open-source project using CodeSandbox for reproductions and demos. We are more than happy to support it through our CodeSandbox Friends program.

But wait, what are CodeSandbox Friends? We're glad you asked! 😅 It is a program through which we offer free or low-cost access to CodeSandbox for eligible projects. We believe in the power of Open Source and we want to support non-profits making a positive impact on the world.

We really love seeing what you build using CodeSandbox. So do share with us what you're working on or which insights you would like to hear from us.

Big Thank You 🖤💚💜️

We hope you enjoyed this issue of Inside the Box! We had a lot to share from the last two months and many activities or updates did not make it. So we encourage you to keep following us on social channels.

We are curious about what you feel is missing from these newsletters and what you would like us to add to the next one!

What should we bring next? Tell us on our community space!

PS: Did you catch the easter egg on the intro? It's our humble shout-out to "Is There Anybody Out There?" by Pink Floyd.

Introducing AI Code Autocomplete Powered by Codeium

ioana — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 19:39:05 +0000

Powerful, accurate code suggestions for every CodeSandbox user.

Filipe Lima
Product Marketing Manager at CodeSandbox

New day, new launch! Today, AI takes a huge leap forward in CodeSandbox with code autocomplete powered by Codeium.

This is the result of a months-long collaboration with the fantastic team behind Codeium, who provide an extremely powerful AI toolkit for developers.

Plus, we are making this available for free for everyone coding in our Devboxes 🎉

The rise of AI coding assistants

Necoline Hubner
Product Manager at CodeSandbox

In the last year, AI-assisted development has taken the world by storm.

Recently, we asked 2200+ developers how they use AI tools and were surprised to find that 78% spend at least 1 hour per week coding with AI tools. So it’s clear that the use of AI to accelerate coding has quickly become an extension of the development process. Yet finding tools that integrate with the development flow is still a challenge.

We aimed to address this with the release of Boxy, our own AI coding assistant. Since we launched it in May, we have learned a few things. First, with AI and code, context is king. External chat tools are a popular companion for most development, yet the burden of good prompting still rests on users to supply. Smart integrations that are context-aware and provide useful suggestions are the ultimate goal.

In speaking with our users, we learned that even context-aware chat and smart prompts are not enough to accelerate development to the extent we wanted for our users. AI code completion has become a vital tool for many developers. It’s not just a huge productivity boost, it can also be a great teacher for new patterns or APIs. So we are very happy to share that Codeium is now integrated into CodeSandbox and immediately available to all CodeSandbox users.

“At Codeium, we believe strongly that every developer should get the best tools no matter where they are developing. Thus, it only made sense to partner with our friends at CodeSandbox so that their massive community gets access to these cutting edge AI-powered features.” — Anshul Ramachandran, Head of Enterprise and Partnerships at Codeium

Codeium autocomplete

Codeium is an incredible AI-powered developer toolkit. Their code completion tool provides single and multi-line code generation with multiple suggestions to choose from. It supports 70+ programming languages, so it’s a perfect fit with our Devboxes, which can also run any type of project.

Showcase of some of Codeium's capabilities running in a Devbox.

As a team, we have been using it to write code, generate tests and suggest language for content. It only took us a number of days using it to fall in love with the integration and less than a week before it completely changed the way we thought about our coding process and estimation times.

Free for everyone

Codeium code completion is now available for free to every CodeSandbox user on Devboxes.

If you have your AI settings enabled, you will get AI autocomplete working in your code immediately. Note that we disable AI permission toggles by default, so if you have not yet enabled them, you will have a chance to do so through our announcement interfaces or through the workspace settings.

While the experience of using Codeium in CodeSandbox should hopefully be very intuitive, we invite you to have a look at our Docs to learn more about settings and customization.

AI is empowerment

Filipe Lima
Product Marketing Manager at CodeSandbox

It’s tricky to cut through all the AI noise. However, we strongly believe that AI has an increasingly powerful role in empowering developers.

By partnering with like-minded providers like Codeium, we are doubling down on making code more accessible to everyone. AI will shape the next few decades of software development. So we want to make sure it’s available to everyone.

To start blazing through code with Codeium, spin up a Devbox, make sure AI features are enabled, and tab away!

Finally, make sure to join our live stream later today for a Q&A with the team that built this integration, with a special guest from Codeium.

Introducing a Unified Development Platform

ioana — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 19:21:32 +0000

Our new Devboxes and improved Sandbox editor are here to help you build anything, no matter how big or small.

Ives van Hoorne
Co-Founder of CodeSandbox

Today I’m thrilled to announce our biggest release of 2023: a consolidation of our development platform with the introduction of Devboxes and a new Sandbox editor.

The highlight of this release is the launch of Devboxes, our upgraded experience that allows you to build, review and prototype projects of any size or language. But after 5 years, we’re also bringing an overhaul to Sandboxes with a new editor that packs more speed and power into a minimalist interface.

To cap it all off, we’ve polished our Dashboard to make it easier than ever to get started, whether you’re just playing around with code or working on a feature branch.

So let’s start unpacking everything that’s new and how you can make the best out of your CodeSandbox experience.

Introducing Devboxes

Necoline Hubner
Product Manager at CodeSandbox

Devboxes are the plantar box for any type of project you can dream up. Previously known as Cloud Sandboxes, Devboxes are built for flexibility and scale. The infrastructure and unique tooling of Devboxes work in combination to remove noise, latency, and distraction of other development contexts.

Increase speed

Devboxes run microVMs and leverage our memory snapshotting to spin up an environment in 1.5 seconds—100+ times faster than other CDEs and local environments.

Remove distraction

In addition to incredible gains in start-up time, Devboxes offer git integrations, PR comments, and built-in previews that make the process of sharing work, collecting feedback, and iterations a breeze. A simple example of this is a recent Slack conversation I had with an engineer on the team.

While discussing the format and copy of a new modal, Danilo sent me the link to the branch which I opened in a Devbox. Together, we moved components around, adjusted text, and settled on a final result in mere minutes. This ability to move discussions into the editor has not only been a productivity boost to our team, but it helps us maintain focus on a specific task—unlike other CDEs and local development, which lead to interruptions or intermediary steps when accessing or contributing to a team member’s work.

Eliminate noise

The Devbox editor is chock-full of features to help developers stay focused on their work. Individual workspace members can choose to open any Devbox in our web editor, VS Code or iOS.

Both VS Code and our web editor combine VS Code features with our own unique editor features to create an elevated, yet intuitive experience. VS Code users can fall back on existing habits as they reach for key bindings, search and replace, or command palette options. At the same time, everyone can benefit from features like AI, streamed terminals, shared tasks, and preview consoles.

Sandbox transformations

Not every idea needs a powerful cloud development environment. Some simply need a Sandbox.

Sandboxes are distinguished from Devboxes by the fact that they run in the browser, they also have a simplified editor experience. The speed and simplicity of the browser-based Sandbox experience have been the bedrock of the CodeSandbox experience for years.

Millions of developers, students, educators and open-source projects rely on our Sandboxes as a way of making it easier to learn, experiment and grow.

Now, after 5 years, it has received a well-deserved update. Sandboxes will now run in the same editor as Devboxes. This new Sandbox editor has all the same features as the previous experience, with a few changes.

Sandboxes still run on the browser to provide a lightweight experience for front-end code.

They also have the same core features such as the dependency picker, embeds, previews and preview consoles. Other favorite features like live sessions and new features like VS Code will only be available on Devboxes, but we’ll talk more about that in a second.

In this new editor, we have carried forward the spirit of speed and simplicity that has powered the rapid prototypes, tests and shareable examples that have blossomed through the community over the years. With a few adjustments and the incorporation of our very own Sandpack bundler, we have managed to make the experience even faster.

Unified Editor

Sandboxes and Devboxes were built with a progress development model in mind. Some ideas start out small and stay small while others grow in size, complexity, or demand for more quality-of-life features for the developer. If you ever notice that your Sandbox code or your coding style are starting to outgrow the constraints of the Sandbox environment, you can directly convert the Sandbox to a Devbox. Now that Sandboxes and Devboxes work within the same editor, transitioning between the two should feel seamless.

When working in a Sandbox, you may find yourself wishing for a terminal or aching for the familiarity of your own VS Code setup. By converting to a Devbox, you can gain access to these features in seconds without needing to adjust to a new editor.

A home for every project

Filipe Lima
Product Marketing Manager at CodeSandbox

Today, there are over 45 million Sandboxes created on CodeSandbox. A mix of quick sketches, bug repros, and examples forked from documentation like the award-winning React Docs, front-end prototypes, and much more.

So we made it a goal for this release to ensure that every coding project has a home in CodeSandbox. Now, whenever you want to start something new, we invite you to “choose your coding adventure”: create a quick sketch on a Sandbox or a big project with a Devbox.

The magic really happens when you connect a GitHub repo to CodeSandbox. Then, we automatically provision a Devbox for every branch as a fully collaborative cloud development environment that spins up in 1.5 seconds and is available 24/7. This means that everyone in your team can work in that same environment and unlock the power of live coding, deployment previews, faster PR reviews, and finally get rid of “it works on my machine!”.

Building the future

Ives van Hoorne
Co-Founder of CodeSandbox

I can’t begin to describe how proud I am of all the fantastic work that our team has pulled through to make this release happen.

We’re building CodeSandbox to be the development platform for everyone. Every week, we have to make hard decisions to ensure we can fulfill this vision. We’re now closer than ever and I’m infinitely grateful that we have such a wonderful community pushing us to go further.

So go ahead and spin up one of your repos in a Devbox to experience why cloud development is so powerful. And as always, come by our community platform to share your feedback!

How We Improved Our Workflows by Dogfooding Our Platform

ioana — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 18:45:45 +0000

Using cloud development to build a cloud development platform.

As an engineer, working at a tech product company comes with the privilege of understanding customers and being able to empathize with your users. Their struggles are most likely your struggles as well. And when you have the unique opportunity to empower them through your work, the reward is tenfold.

Even before I joined CodeSandbox back in 2020, I was fascinated with small and medium-sized team workflows and code collaboration. Engineering is never a solo effort. Working in a team, having other eyes on your code and bringing in non-engineering roles into the discussion are all vital for the success of the product.

The current state of code collaboration

Code collaboration happens around git, branches and pull requests. And while all of these are battle-proven and have their strengths, they also come with some drawbacks.

Git is great for storing and versioning code, but with no tooling around, it is still a pull-based mechanism for collaboration. It is your responsibility to check if the remote version of the repository has updates. Also, your local branch can get out of sync with the remote target branch whenever someone else pushes some changes.

Branches on top of the git model are a great way of separating code changes into different work streams. But local development forces you to point to a single branch. This can become a burden when working in a bigger team where constant review and integration are needed. Checking out a different branch can result in any number of errors: build or runtime crashes, invalid dependencies, and so on. It also adds the inconvenience of having to stash or commit your code to avoid losing changes.

Finally, pull/merge requests are the backbone of code reviews and work integration. Yet git providers offer only a static version of the code and require you to switch back and forth between the platform and the code environment / browser dev server. Unless you use plugins or integrations between your systems, code reviewing requires a switch of environment.

Enter cloud development

Over the past 2 years our team has been working on a new CodeSandbox experience, a cloud-based environment, readily available, sharable, and super friendly for collaboration and work integration.

And while it was still a beta product, we’ve been successfully using it for the past 18 months. Here’s how it helped us collaborate more and improve our workflows.

Each branch with a unique environment

Instead of having an environment for each user, we flipped the model to build the environments around branches. This facilitates collaboration, as branches are searchable and shareable via a URL. Now anyone can jump between environments without affecting their work in progress.

This model allows us to work on multiple features in parallel. It also allows us to collaborate on the same code changes async, without the fear of conflicts or outdated versions of the same branch.

Automated git flows

One of the most frustrating git experiences is to branch out from main and then hours later find out that you branched from an older commit. This can lead to git conflicts and can get you off track very fast as you have to focus on solving the git problem before your actual project work.

So we decided to optimize some common git flows. Whenever you branch out, we make sure you branch from the latest version of the remote branch. Our git integration also shows you when you need to pull the target branch because of new commits upstream. It also automatically pulls the remote branch in case someone else works on the same branch in another environment.

These flows are especially nice for distributed teams. I often leave my work in progress overnight and when I pick it up in the morning I immediately notice I’m behind the target branch.

Reviews and comments in the code editor

Since the branch has its own environment, we are also supporting PR workflows in the same environment. Once a PR is created, the same branch link can be used to ask for code reviews. The PR diffs allow you to see the changes, add comments and submit a review summary. All this while running dev servers, tests or any other tasks. This lowers context switching and allows our team to easily flip between code reviews and development.

But also this helped other team members get involved in the review process. We often have colleagues from product, design or marketing getting involved in the PRs, as exemplified in the video below.

A new default

It’s interesting how developing the cloud development experience took us closer to using cloud development for work. It got to the point where most of our team members (including myself) have a hard time switching back to a local development.

I’m super excited about the prospect of more teams adopting cloud development. It might not be the right solution for everyone, but it definitely is a huge productivity booster for us. Also, using CodeSandbox to build CodeSandbox is an experience on its own, but that’s a story for another time ;)

To try this experience for yourself, import a repository into CodeSandbox. And if you're new to our platform, don't forget to follow our "Getting started" course.

CodeSandbox Launch Week

ioana — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 18:24:53 +0000

Our first launch week is here! Catch the live updates.

Hello hello 👋 Welcome to the very first CodeSandbox Launch Week 🎉

If you’ve been tracking our progress for the last few months, we haven’t stopped shipping for a minute. But while we focused on improving stability and performance across the board, we also set some of our most ambitious projects in motion.

These projects are… pretty big! So, what better way to unveil them to our beloved community than with a good ol’ launch week?

Launch week structure

We wanted this launch week to be a reflection of all the work we’ve been putting into our product and the broader community. This means we did launch week in our own flavor, with a mix of new features, events, and one or two surprises!

This blog post is a recap of everything we announced but also follow us on Twitter and our community platform for more updates.

Alright, let’s get right into it!

Day #1: Engineering day

Monday, November 20, 2023

Alright, let’s be real for a sec—who dares do a big launch on a Monday?

So, Day 1 was all about warming up for a very exciting week with a unique, insider’s view into our own Engineering teams. And you’re in for a treat! Alex, from our client team, published an insightful engineering blog post about how we improved our workflows at CodeSandbox by using CodeSandbox to build… CodeSandbox. Yes, you read that right.

From improved collaboration to automating git flows, Alex brings a unique view into what it’s like to build a production-ready product on a cloud development platform.

But we won’t spoil it for you! Read the full blog post and share your own engineering insights with us on our community platform!

Blog post “How We Improved Our Workflows by Dogfooding Our Platform”.

Day #2: Unified Platform

Tuesday, November 21, 2023

On Day 2, we announced what is probably our biggest launch of 2023: a consolidation of our development platform with the introduction of Devboxes and a new Sandbox editor.

Devboxes are the key highlight of this release, as they provide an upgraded experience that allows you to build, review and prototype projects of any size or language. But Sandboxes also finally received an update after 5 years!

Read our blog post and catch the live stream and live Q&A with the team!

So, let us know what you think about all these updates!

Day #3: AI Code Autocomplete Powered by Codeium

Wednesday, November 22, 2023

Day 3 of CodeSandbox Launch Week brought good news to everyone out there coding with AI! We announced our partnership with Codeium, which brings AI-powered code autocomplete to CodeSandbox 🥳

Everyone coding with our Devboxes now gets blazing-fast autocomplete powered by Codeium, which supports 70+ programming languages. Plus, it's 100% free to use!

We have been using this ourselves for a couple of months and we immediately fell in love with it. So try it out yourself and let us know what you think!

And to cap off Day 3, we went live with the team that worked on the Unified Platform and Codeium integration to celebrate with our community and answer their questions.

Day #4: VS Code editor

Thursday, November 23, 2023

Day 4 was all about the overhaul of our editor, powered by VS Code.

This brings several changes and improvements, namely

Faster editor experience
Revamped sidebar and bottom bar
Support for VS Code settings
Support for VS Code keybindings
Support for VS Code themes

All running within our UI!

Overview of the key editor changes, powered by VS Code.

If you're curious about the motivations behind this change, check out this post by our co-founder Ives.
Day #5: Virtual Open House & Black Friday

Friday, November 24, 2023

All good things must end.

So Friday was a day of celebration for us, together with our community, in the first-ever CodeSandbox Open House 🏡

This visit to our virtual office included a tour, some easter eggs and fun activities. Some lucky visitors even won some CodeSandbox swag! We had a wonderful time with everyone who joined us!

And to wrap up the week, we are also celebrating Black Friday by launching our biggest promo ever: 25% off on Pro on new 1-month or 1-year subscriptions.

Grab it while it lasts (available until Nov 27th at 11:59 pm PT) - use BFCSB23 at checkout.

Stay along for the ride

We are absolutely thrilled to have hosted the first CodeSandbox launch week and shared it with every single community member!

The week may be over, but the celebration continues on our community platform.

Thank you for joining us and remember—everything we launch, we launch for you.

Meet the CodeSandbox Community’s New Home

ioana — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 20:03:50 +0000

At CodeSandbox, we run your code in our cloud infrastructure, configure the environment for you and keep your code always ready, behind a shareable URL. Give it a try with this Next.js example or import your GitHub repo!

By Ioana Chiorean, Engineering and DevRel Manager at CodeSandbox

Today is a day of celebration for CodeSandbox and our extensive community because we have just launched our brand-new community home 🎉

Community is the heartbeat of human society. And even if each can define it differently, like contributors, users, or supporters, we consider the community as one of the pillars that drives us to build a better product—more accessible, more empowering, and more collaborative. Having spent 13 years in open source communities, I truly believe being part of a community is the best way to grow and connect.

Over the years, CodeSandbox has grown into a vibrant community of more than 2 million developers who have created over 45 million apps in CodeSandbox. By launching our new community home, we are making it easier than ever for community members to learn, explore, and connect. Have a look at codesandbox.community and keep reading to learn what’s new!

Creating a new home

By Filipe Lima, Support Lead at CodeSandbox

As we grew CodeSandbox into the powerful cloud development environment it is today, we kept listening to our community and learning how to make our offering better for everyone.

While Discord gave us an excellent platform to chat with our users directly, it also made it difficult to maintain the different channels and go beyond the standard chat functionality. So, taking years of successes, mistakes and feedback into consideration, we created a simple, transparent, open platform for every member of the CodeSandbox community.

As we explore below, we structured this platform to empower you to find all the resources and help you need, share feedback, and showcase all the cool projects you’re working on.

Product Resources

To make it easier for new community members to get up and running with our product, we created a “Getting started with CodeSandbox” course using some of our best videos and guides.

You can keep up with the latest product news and releases on the Announcements space and we also created a Sandpack space where we share all that's going on with Sandpack.

Finally, we highly encourage you to share a testimonial of your experience using CodeSandbox, so that you can tell your story to the world and inspire other CodeSandbox users!

Helping and getting help

By James Amey, Support Lead at CodeSandbox

At CodeSandbox we strongly believe that we can create the best, most accessible coding and development experience by keeping our ears close to the ground and listening to the thoughts, feedback and ideas of our users.

One of the big issues from the Support side that has helped drive this new community project forward was the continued frustration that we’ve had trying to support CodeSandbox users on Discord. Even with a dedicated help channel those with genuine issues would often post about them and air their frustrations in other areas which often resulted in problems getting missed. Less than ideal. We want to get you back to developing as soon as we can!

So in our new community we went back to the drawing board. We had a long discussion about how we’ve seen issues reported and how we can best guide people to provide the information that we need to solve them. There was no re-invention of the wheel here, in fact almost the opposite as we came to the conclusion that a key problem was that people didn’t have a clear place to go to make their other helpful suggestions… other than a general help channel.

So we decided to split “help” into two new channels with clearer purpose:

Bugs — A place to report genuine "blockers" or issues that you encounter.
Give feedback — A more general area to air ideas and thoughts that you have about the CodeSandbox experience.
Feature requests — For when those ideas and thoughts come together into a suggestion you have to improve CodeSandbox!

As we said, hardly reinventing the wheel. But a needed change to help us to hear you and then in turn make CodeSandbox better.

We also wanted to make it much easier for our users to let us know what they would like us to prioritize. To this end our new community has a voting system that will allow you, our users, to 'upvote' the submissions that you most want us to see. We can then in turn triage these problems or suggestions with a greater awareness of how much they matter and are affecting you.

Of course, if you have an urgent issue or need to discuss your account or payments please contact Support instead of posting on our community. Due to Data Protection we can’t discuss specific accounts in a publicly accessible place.

Finding community resources

By Ioana Chiorean, Engineering and DevRel Manager at CodeSandbox

We also created a more specific community section where we will put the spotlight on the content and activities we create for our community, as well as cool projects built by the community itself. Here you will be able to ask others for help, share your work and get feedback. Each Friday we highlight one project done by our community with a community highlight on social media and we include some of them in our community newsletter.

We will add events we are organizing or attending—this will cover conferences we speak at, meetups we contribute to, or our own series of public panels and AMAs. Want us to speak at an event near you? Feel free to write us about it.

To wrap up this section, we have an “Engineering insights” space, where we will gather informative articles and cool projects from the web ecosystem. This is the perfect space to share something nice you read that made an impact during your learning or maybe something you wrote in order to help others and share.

Always feel at home

Today marks an exciting milestone in the journey of CodeSandbox and our incredible community. We believe that this new community platform will redefine the way we connect, learn, and grow together. A place that we hope will enable the soul of our community—the people!

Each of you, whether you're a contributor, user, or supporter, has shaped the way we build a better, more accessible, more empowering, and more collaborative product.

Let's continue to shape the future of CodeSandbox, and by extension, the future of our global developer community. We invite you to join, introduce yourself, share bits from your experience by sharing the projects you’re working on, and add feature requests that you think might help others too.

See you on codesandbox.community! Come say hi!

Inside the Box: October Community Update

ioana — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 23:59:33 +0000

Hellloooo 👋

A new month is upon us—the one you would think is the ninth ("Nov...") but showed up late to the party so got relegated to eleventh place in the calendar. Any good songs about it?

'Till we find one, let's see what kept us busy at CodeSandbox this last month!

Latest Product News

Dev Container support 📦 — In one of our biggest product releases of 2023, we introduced Dev Container spec in CodeSandbox. This is now the default spec for all CodeSandbox projects and you can use our brand-new DevTool to configure any environment in seconds 🔥

Plus, with the latest update to our VS Code extension, you can now connect to containers running inside the CodeSandbox microVMs using the Dev Containers extension. This brings improved support for repos and sandboxes configured with Dev Containers and gets rid of the VS Code "trust" modal.

CodeSandbox Enterprise 🏦 — We introduced CodeSandbox Enterprise as a new offering that brings scalability, availability, security and trust to our CDE—the only one in the market that spins up an environment in 1.5 seconds, is available 24/7, and is fully collaborative. Private beta is now open!

Boxy AI gets GPT-4 🤖 — We have upgraded Boxy, your CodeSandbox AI assistant, to use GPT-4 by default. Based on our testing, this (as expected) greatly increases the quality of Boxy's responses. (Boxy is available to Pro subscribers.)

Full Changelog — This past month, we made a lot of improvements and fixes across the board but we also shipped some powerful new features. Check the changelog page for all the details on what we shipped 🚀

Meet Us @ Events

CityJS Berlin — This Friday, Ioana Chiorean, our Engineering and DevRel Manager, is MCing the main stage at City JS Berlin. If you are around do say hi—we hear she's carrying some swag! You can also follow the live stream of the main track and of the focus room.

JS Heroes Meetup — Mid-October, Alex Moldovan, Product Engineer here at CodeSandbox, took part in "A round table on today’s market conditions".

ElixirConf, Orlando — At the beginning of October, our colleague AJ Foster, Back-end Engineer here at CodeSandbox, spoke about "Filling the Gaps in the Ecosystem". The recording of the talk is up now!

Web Bytes

DevContainers panel — This week, we hosted a panel discussion on bringing a universal spec to cloud development environments. Ioana Chiorean was joined by Joji Augustine and Danilo Woznica for a panel on the fresh support for DevContainers—that's right, the one you read above in Product Updates!

Engineer @ Work: Solving puzzling engineering challenges with Impact! — Our lead engineer Christian Alfoni is continuing this series and goes live a couple of times a week trying to solve some of our most complex engineering problems. In October, Danilo Woznica joined him and they had a blast! Check this one, and this other one. More to come!

Hacktoberfest — Hacktoberfest is over… or is it? 😌 Before the Hacktoberfest blues kick in, don’t forget that open source is never out of season! And a new celebration of Advent of Code is almost knocking at our doors. So, let’s keep the spirit of contributions going! Some of our engineers shared their advice with those who want to contribute to open source. Start now!

Community Spotlight

Each Friday, we use Twitter (X?) to shine a light on some of the best projects amazing people create using our platform. But this Friday, we start with a BIG announcement!

CodeSandbox Community 💖 — We are extremely happy to launch our new community space! We created an environment on Circle where you can share your stories and your projects, raise some feature requests, and get in touch with us! As a treasured community member, you get an early invite to join the community before we launch it next week. Don't forget to introduce yourself!

Virtual Tropical Beach — Autumn kinda settled in around Europe... And with the clock change too, we would definitely enjoy a sunnier place 🏝️ or a glimpse of it! Who’s in? A ✨ Community Spotlight ✨ shoutout to @cantbefaraz for creating it!

We really love seeing what you build using CodeSandbox. So do share with us what you’re working on or which insights you would like to hear from us.

Thank You ❤️

We hope you enjoyed this issue of Inside the Box!

We are curious about what you feel is missing from these newsletters and what you would like us to add to the next one!

What should we bring next? Tell us on our new community space!

Celebrating Hacktoberfest With Tips for Open-Source

ioana — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 14:54:40 +0000

CodeSandbox engineers share their tips on contributing to open source while having fun at it.

_At CodeSandbox, we run your code in our cloud infrastructure, configure the environment for you and keep your code always ready, behind a shareable URL. Give it a try with this Next.js example or import your GitHub repo!
_

In the realm of technology, open-source software has emerged as a powerful force, driving innovation, collaboration, and accessibility. With its potential to empower developers, foster community, and solve real-world problems, open source is more than just a movement—it's a way of life for many in the tech world.

For us at CodeSandbox, we stand by it as a company but also as individuals. We released our browser editor, Sandpack, and parts of Nodebox as open source and we want to give back any time we can!

So, let’s look at the open source ecosystem, why it’s a big deal, and which tips CodeSandbox engineers have for everyone wanting to contribute.

The universe of open-source

Open source refers to software that is made available to the public with a license that grants anyone the right to view, use, modify, and distribute the code. This transparency fosters collaboration and innovation. Popular open-source projects like Linux, Apache, and Python have had a profound impact on the technology landscape, demonstrating that collective efforts can lead to world-changing results.

One of the most exciting celebrations of open source is Hacktoberfest, an annual event held throughout October that brings together developers from around the globe to contribute to open-source projects.

Like all things on this planet, it is not a perfect event. It has gone through its struggles and some negative reputation, but we want to emphasize the positive side of it. For us, the quality and the impact of the PRs are important. People learning to code, work in a team, contribute, and collaborate through open source are our drive. You can easily spot this as part of our values.

Hacktoberfest exemplifies the collaborative spirit of open source. The event encourages developers to engage with existing projects, identify issues, and contribute meaningful solutions. It's a fantastic opportunity for both beginners and experienced developers to learn and grow by working together on real-world code. It is a great way to expand your technical skill set. Go beyond writing feature code by fixing bugs, improving documentation, or enhancing user interfaces.

Tips on contributing

In the true spirit of open source, we asked our engineers to share some of their advice with our community. So let’s unroll them below!

Our first stop in the team is Danilo, Product Engineer and maintainer for Sandpack.

When contributing to an open-source project, remember to focus on one specific problem and aim to solve it effectively, keeping the project's purpose clear and avoiding unnecessary feature additions. But it’s also important to have fun: try our different approaches, introduce new (but stable) technologies, do different! Keep a welcoming, kind, and responsible environment in your interactions with the community, and consider that the project belongs to the community, not just to you.

Danilo shared a longer version on his blog.

Ioana, our Engineering Manager has more than 15 years spent in open source! Here is what she believes is the most important thing.

Always show up. Whatever you decide to contribute to, be it code or driving initiative, once you commit to something, show up regularly. Everyone has busy lives, and encounters different issues in their personal or work lives that might interfere with the free time that they want to dedicate. Everyone understands things can change. So if something happens, be there to let others know.

Jasper, our Staff Software Engineer and one of the main contributors to Sandpack and Nodebox puts the emphasis on value.

Do something you like or start off with simple things to add value, for example, if you use a project a lot it's very valuable to contribute to its documentation, or if you find a bug that seems easy to fix, try to dive in to fix it and don't be afraid to ask maintainers for help, they're usually pretty helpful if you show initiative to fix it yourself. Basically, start with something small and easy, some projects even have issues tagged "good first issue" for this case

Our Principal Software Engineer, Christian, encourages you to share more about your learnings with others. He also runs a live stream series that we call Engineer @ Work.

When developing and maintaining open source projects you very quickly become “out of touch” of what it is like to see the tool for the first time and try to use it for the first time. The absolutely best possible way to contribute to open source is by helping people understand and get going with the tool. This can be direct contributions to the existing documentation or your writing a blog post. With a blog post, you have more freedom and can do things like comparing different tools, explaining where the tool shines and where it does not shine, etc. Medium.com is a good way to get started writing blog posts.

Mihai, one of our Infrastructure Engineers, helps a non-profit run its infrastructure too.

When you want to start working on something, be sure to assign you to it and update it regularly. The maintainers need to know the status, if you encounter any problems or you need help. You might not be able to finish it or not have time for it, and that is no problem. But do update the status so people know what’s going on with that issue.

Alex, Product Engineer, conference and meetup organizer, shares the ultimate encouragement.

Don’t be afraid to get involved in communities and open source, because it can change your entire perspective on coding and building software!

Finally, here’s a tip from everyone on the CodeSandbox team: to focus on coding and contributing instead of spending a lot of time configuring and maintaining a dev environment, use our CDE! Import a repo to CodeSandbox and let our microVM infra spin up your projects in 1.5 seconds. Plus, don’t forget to use our contribution branches to speed up how you contribute to open source (here’s a tutorial).

It’s your time to shine

The impact of Hacktoberfest doesn't end when October concludes. The contributions made during the event continue to benefit users and the open-source community. The collaborations created during this month often extend beyond, as participants find themselves more involved in open-source projects year-round.

As we wrap up this series of tips and tricks, we invite you to be part of this global celebration of collaboration and innovation. If you've been inspired by the stories and technical examples shared in this blog, it's time to take action! Share your open-source journey, your experiences with Hacktoberfest, or any valuable advice you have for fellow developers. Your stories can inspire and guide others on their own open-source adventures.

The first step? Open your favorite open-source project in CodeSandbox. Everyone in a team can do it, no matter if they write code daily or ad-hoc—you can easily share your code for a review and collaborate in real-time doing it! Literally, everything you need is at your fingertips.

Get involved. Together, we can shape the future of technology, one pull request at a time.

Inside the Box: September Community Update

ioana — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 12:57:39 +0000

Aloha 👋

Another month bites the dust! (admit it, you read that singing, didn't you?)

If you wanna get it directly to your inbox and never miss an edition, subscribe here!

It is time to unroll another edition of our newsletter!

Latest Product News

New command palette powered by VS Code 🔥 — We overhauled our command palette and file picker to use its VS Code equivalent. This has lots of benefits and the palette should now feel much faster and more reliable. Plus, when you run commands like "Ask Boxy...", "Run task..." or "Create branch...", that will activate a new quick picker.

AI Commit Messages 2.0 — One of the most loved Boxy AI features has definitely been the AI-generated commit messages. Isn't it wonderful not having to write every commit by hand? In version 2.0, Boxy now generates a commit title and description, to give even more context to your changes. Also, when you open a PR, it will be pre-filled with a short title and description based on the commits.

Streaming search results — Searching the entire codebase can be very resource-intensive on larger projects. So, we have improved the search logic to use the new Pitcher client and use streaming whenever possible. Searching should now feel instant!

Full Changelog — There are a few more things we freshly backed - not cookies - so be sure to check the changelog for all the goodies we shipped. 🚀

Meet Us @ Events

React Live — Last Friday, Ives, one of our founders, talked about "All the Ways You Can Run JavaScript" at React Live. React has changed a lot over the past few years, and the dev servers have changed too. From Webpack to Create-React-App to Next.js, there have been many ways to run our code. In his talk, he described how CodeSandbox runs your code, and what changes we've made to our execution environment to support new dev servers and frameworks.

DevTalks Cluj-Napoca — Ioana, our Engineering Manager joined the local chapter in her hometown - Women in Tech Cluj and shared a panel discussion on the topic of "Equity, Diversity, and Women in the IT industry". She truly believes the future is built on diversity and equity, which was the theme of her masterclass there.

revo.js Timișoara — This week, Alex Moldovan, Product Engineer here at CodeSandbox, will talk about "The Ethical Choice"

CodeBeam Europe — Sanne, our Software Engineer flavored in Elixir, will be at CodeBeam Europe in Berlin, later this month. She is part of the Programme Committee, those who put out the hard work to craft the amazing agenda for the event!

Web Bytes

Sandpack Panel — In mid-September, Ioana was joined by Josh and Alex for a panel on building live coding experiences with Sandpack. Check out the recording and share with us how you use Sandpack!

Engineer @ Work: Solving puzzling engineering challenges with Impact! — Our lead engineer Christian is going live a couple of times a week trying to solve some of our most complex engineering problems. You can watch last Tuesday's session or catch the next one this Thursday!

Hacktoberfest — Open Source Software is very dear to our mission, values and part of our colleagues' daily work or hobbies. And while we do understand that sometimes, people are more excited about a submitted PR no matter its impact, we do want to encourage you to contribute to OSS. If you need to start a new project, we have powerful templates to help you jump straight into coding.

Community Spotlight

Each Friday, we use Twitter (X?) to shine a light on some of the best projects amazing people create using our platform.

Learn to Code with AI Teacher At Codequick — We are more than happy to be the platform that CodeQuick chose for their code learning project!

We really love seeing what you build using CodeSandbox. So do share with us what you’re working on or which insights you would like to hear from us.

Thank You ❤️

We hope you enjoyed this issue of Inside the Box!

We are curious about what you feel is missing from these newsletters and what you would like us to add to the next one!

What should we bring next? Tell us on Discord!

Inside the Box: August Community Update

ioana — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 14:50:03 +0000

Hey 👋

Oh well, summer days went fast, didn't they? In the meantime, we were super busy here at CodeSandbox!

If you wanna get it directly to your inbox and never miss an edition, subscribe here

Let's start unrolling our August product updates!

Latest Product News

Deployment Preview for Every Branch 🔥 — The rise of cloud development environments like CodeSandbox opens the door to dedicated deployment previews for every branch, a great way of accelerating code reviews.
At CodeSandbox, we give every branch a dedicated microVM (with very generous base specs). Read more details about how we do this on our blog.

Dependency picker in cloud sandboxes — Now you can debug your project using Chrome DevTools integrated into CodeSandbox. DevTools links will open the respective file directly on the CodeSandbox editor.

Enable VIM mode — We have introduced VIM mode support in our cloud editor. This means you can now enable VIM on repositories and cloud sandboxes.

Full Changelog — August just flew right by. One moment you're sippin' and shippin' at the beach, the next you remember it's almost time for pumpkin spice lattes. There was a lot of work put into stability and performance improvements–but first, dive into the cool new features we shipped. 🚀

Meet Us @ Events

ElixirConf US — At the beginning of September, our colleague, AJ Foster, spoke at the ElixirConf about a new OpenAPI client code generator that combines the ergonomics of hand-crafted libraries with the maintainability of generated code.

React Live — We are closing the month with a splash! One of our founders, Ives van Hoorne, will take the stage to talk about the future of CodeSandbox!

Join our Sandpack Discussion Panel — We're continuing our tradition of having our community meet our engineers and learn more about things we're building. Join next's week discussion on building live coding experiences with Sandpack to see how this project is evolving and empowering our community.

Web Bytes

The Internet of PHP — While the diversity of languages and frameworks on the front-end side never ceases to surprise and impress us, the server-side programming languages world is mainly... PHP. This article explains who uses it at scale, how they do it, and whether PHP is innovating or trapped in time.

Bun 1.0 is out! — The fantastic team behind Bun has released its stable version. Bun is all about speed and less complexity, so we really vibe with their mission of empowering web developers. Fork our Bun starter to give it a try!

Community Spotlight

Each Friday, we use Twitter (or X, or whatever it's called these days) to shine a light on some of the best projects amazing people create using our platform.

Embeddable CAD in one click — We got mesmerized by how Buerli uses CodeSandbox and Docker to integrate powerful non-manifold solid CAD kernels into your web apps. Check the project here.

We really love seeing what you build using CodeSandbox. So do share with us what you’re working on or which insights you would like to hear from us.

Thank You ❤️

We hope you enjoyed issue #3!

We thank you for your patience as this got out a bit later than usual. We will be back on track next month.

What should we bring next? Tell us on Discord!

Inside the Box: July Community Update

ioana — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 18:41:24 +0000

Hey 👋

We were overwhelmed by the words of appreciation and support we received after sending our first newsletter. It definitely drives us to continue this initiative and to make it more significant for you.
If you wanna get it directly to your inbox and never miss an edition, subscribe here

So buckle up for its second edition!

Latest Product News

Full code reviews in CodeSandbox 🔥 — “Boy, do I love the code review process at my company!”, said (almost) no one. We understand this pain, so we are making CodeSandbox the all-in-one solution for code reviews.
Read all about it on our blog, but the tl;dr is: we give every PR a running branch that resumes in 1 second, plus a GitHub bot that adds these (shareable) running-branch links to your team’s PRs, which gets rid of context-switching.

CodeSandbox themes — Gone are the days of darkness 🦇 We finally introduced light theme support in our cloud editor, plus some new popular themes built by the community. Don’t miss Danilo Woznica’s post and comment if you’d like us to add a specific theme.

Changelog — Yes, we know… Summer took over the northern hemisphere and most of you are out for some relaxing holidays—or at least we hope so. When you are back, go over the full July changelog to see what we implemented this past month. (It’s 100% worth the read!)

Meet Us @ Events

#WeAreDevs — Last week, the World Congress by We Are Developers took place in Berlin. Our colleague, Ioana Chiorean, attended the conference days and really enjoyed the opening by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. If you were there, share your favorite moment with us! If you did not attend, it would be cool to know which conference makes it to your calendar (maybe we can meet you there next time!)

PS: A big shout-out to Miro for running their coding challenge daily at their booth using... yes, you guessed it—CodeSandbox!

Join our Community Call — A new month, a new opportunity to meet our engineers and to learn more about what’s new at CodeSandbox. Also, by joining the call, you’ll have the perfect chance to share that new project you created using CodeSandbox. And we promise everyone will be nice.

Web Bytes

The State of Code Reviews — Earlier this summer, we sent out a survey asking developers, managers and designers how they deal with code reviews. More than 2000 people answered! Below is one of the highlighted charts, but you can download the full report for free.

Merging Worlds and PRs — Read the inspiring story of how our colleague Necoline Hubner used sandboxes to help refugees in Kakuma, Kenya learn to code 🧑‍💻

The "LGTM" problem — Who has never "LGTM" a code review? But could this be more than a meme and a sign of cop-out code reviews that hurt code quality? We looked at the data to find out.

Community Spotlight

Our community members are building mind-blowing projects on CodeSandbox! Let's look at some cool examples and collaborations.

freeCodeCamp tutorial — BrianHHough used CodeSandbox in his freeCodeCamp full-stack AWS / Next.js / TypeScript tutorial. This app generates inspirational quote cards in Node.js and tests the scripts for making these graphics before running them in AWS servers.

ImageDisplayControl — Shout-out to Frameright for adding interactive sandboxes that provide simple examples of the IDC components in action without the need to download or install anything. Enjoy their web component and React component!

We enjoy seeing what you build using CodeSandbox. So do share with us what you’re working on or which insights you would like to hear from us.

Thank You ❤️

We hope you enjoyed issue #2!

We appreciate you for being a part of our community and we thank you for supporting this initiative!

What should we bring next? Tell us on Discord!

Inside the Box: June Community Update

ioana — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 18:39:51 +0000

Welcome to "Inside the Box"!
You might wonder: what’s up with this newsletter?

With so much going on, we wanted a way to keep our community up to date on product announcements, community highlights, useful resources, and events.

So, we're kicking off a monthly email! If you wanna get it directly to your inbox and never miss an edition, subscribe here

Welcome to issue #1. We're glad you're here for the journey.

Latest Product News

Have you met Boxy? Now, you have a brand-new AI assistant in CodeSandbox! Ask Boxy to write, refactor and review code—it always has the full context of your project. Test our AI Playground here ✨

Running Anything on CodeSandbox — Recently, we released a major update: Docker support. This is a game-changer! Long gone are the days when we only ran JavaScript. Today, CodeSandbox runs anything 🔥

Changelog — We were pretty busy shippin' in the first half of 2023! Check the latest changelog for a rundown of what's new.

Meet Us @ Events

Render ATL — Earlier this month, our Co-Founder Ives was in Atlanta sharing “The Technical Story & Learnings of CodeSandbox”. Seems like folks really enjoyed the demo of a Minecraft server running in CodeSandbox!

DevTalks Bucharest — Our Engineering Manager Ioana traveled to Bucharest, Romania, for the DevTalks Conference! She moderated the web stage, closed with a talk on the learnings from building our platform, and went on live TV 📺

JS Nation — At the beginning of June, Sandpack got nominated to the JavaScript OSS Awards. We are very proud and happy to see it thrive and get such major recognition from the community!

Panel on Code Reviews — Code reviews are a tricky topic to talk about. So we're doing exactly that, chatting with Engineering Managers about the main problems of code reviews and how to nail them. Save your seat! And bring popcorn 🍿

Community Spotlight

Our community members are building mind-blowing projects on CodeSandbox! Let's look at some cool examples and collaborations.

Liveblocks— We are proud to be part of the Liveblocks journey! Check how they are bringing the fun back to product discovery and learning by building an interactive playground with Sandpack.

Discover Page — Earlier this year, we released a page highlighting the best projects built by our community and some of our brand-new project starters like Next.js Commerce. Doesn't it look stunning? 😍

Web Bytes

Finally, here are some hot news bytes picked by our team!

AI Coding Tools — Gergely Orosz wrote about the explosion in the number of software engineers using AI coding tools. What's your take on this? Is AI part of your workflow, or are you just watching it with curiosity for now? Let us know on Twitter!

Rust in CodeSandbox — Earlier this year, we announced Rust support, one of the most loved programming languages. Give it a try 🦀

Building runtime-aware JavaScript packages — JK Namburu wrote about how to build JavaScript packages for multiple runtimes, for better compatibility.

What's Next?

We hope you enjoyed issue #1!

If you have feedback on how we can improve this newsletter, let us know.
After all, we created it for you.