This is such a cool tool - I worked in coding education and always loved tools that let you playback/annotate code.

Thanks for posting!

I seriously considered App Maker to build some internal code flows but could not develop the trust needed to deploy into production. With SaaS apps that require serious onboarding and deployment it's become almost impossible to trust Google in particular on this issue.

I'm hoping SMBs will start to seriously consider business continuity as a key feature of SaaS. If I wanted to differentiate as a SaaS product today, I'd consider offering putting at minimum source code into escrow upon sale/bankruptcy.

Genuinely curious, in your experience, have you found a particular set of SaaS apps to have required a more involved Onboarding/Deployment or is it generally a few usual suspects?

Surprising this left out the dominance of Salesforce for business process and general CRUD type apps.

It's interesting that nothing open source has emerged in this space.

Lots of choices in the closed source space. Salesforce, Airtable, Quickbase, Google AppMaker, Knack, Zoho, etc.

It takes a lot of hand holding when your "citizen developers" (legit Salesforce term) are unqualified engineers.

Unsure how that combines with open source...

BonitaSoft has an open source community edition.

Been trying to use Airtable for a few apps (project management, quotes, etc) and it just lacks enough that it can't be used practically in a reusable fashion.

Actually Yazz.com is open source and a low code environment so this is not true

Ahh, hadn't seen that before. I stand corrected.

As soon as you get something slightly complicated they tend to involve 10 times the code.

I was surprised by the omission as well.

This has been so true for myself and many of our instructors at Fullstack Academy. There are so many cool ideas in programming that you can get by without - but once you start teaching it forces you to truly wrestle with those ideas. Definitely makes you a stronger programmer on the other side.

What are some of those cool ideas?

Excellent thought piece - wish HN was filled with more original analogies like this I one.

This reminds me a bit of domain driven contexts (something just added to Elixir/Phoenix 1.3) - reducing the surface area of sub nodes from each other by exposing that single point interface.

I’ve been wondering if I can do away with the web layer all together and provide RPC directly to certain contexts fairly trivially over web sockets. REST feels really tired when working with state containers IMO.

This seemed very promising, protobuffers to automated typescript over gRPC.

https://github.com/improbable-eng/grpc-web

I’m the same way - I have lots of side project ideas I’d love to use Go for but get that early Rails like productivity. I maintain a few Rails apps and now view many of the things I’ve done as hacks to work around the lack of concurrency (though that was just Rails’ reality in late 2000s).

Elixir is close to my ideal though I like static types and a better community around libs would be nice.

You might be interested to check out https://gobuffalo.io/

Just a thank you to the VS Code team for the awesome work (and really love the new Terminal updates).

Love the integrated terminal in VS Code! Great work by the team on this and appreciate the writeup.

Curious what keyboard shortcut people use to move focus from editors to the Terminal and create new terminals? Anyone use tmux inside terminal?

Author of the blog post here. The standard shortcuts are ctrl+` for toggling the panel and ctrl+shift+` for creating a new terminal. This is what I use on top of that:

{ "key": "ctrl+`", "command": "workbench.action.terminal.focus", "when": "!terminalFocus" }

This will focus the terminal if the focus is anywhere else, if the terminal is focused it will close it.

You can add this one if you want ctrl+` to only toggle focus between the terminal and the last editor:

{ "key": "ctrl+`", "command": "workbench.action.focusActiveEditorGroup", "when": "terminalFocus" }

On tmux, Joao from the team did a write up on configuring persistent sessions in the terminal using tmux https://medium.com/@joaomoreno/persistent-terminal-sessions-...

Last I checked, this only makes sense on US keyboards. On most non-US keyboards, the backtick requires option/alt and isn't practical as a shortcut.

I think you could just add a custom keybinding now that you know the commands.

A big thing that I use is that if you do quick open (`ctrl+p`) and then type `term `, you can then type the terminal number to go to the specified terminal.

I added the following to my keybindings.json file. It changes ctrl+` behavior to toggle open/close the terminal.

``` { "key": "ctrl+`", "command": "workbench.action.terminal.focus", "when": "!terminalFocus" } ```

Curious if anyone has an idea how the multi-mouse system worked. My guess is that on the screen being shared, a transparent full-screen window is overlaid that just draws in the second mouse and that when this proxy mouse is clicked the event gets simulated on the sharer's side.

This effect was so cool and would love to see an open-source library that shows the effect over WebRTC. Curious if it's anything more complicated than that and why it's never been replicated by other packages.

It really depends on if I believed that my fifth day would be mine or would the demands of the work bleed into that day? Similar to 20% time at Google - it's easy for your "real" work to take over that time if you don't defend it actively and it's unlikely that you'll be vigilant the whole time.

I think in knowledge work - trading off time for salary is generally not a great move because we're almost always "on the clock."

I'm assuming office is closed.