

Nitrous.io raises $6.65M Series A - sandeepc
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/03/18/with-6-65m-in-its-pocket-nitrous-io-is-set-to-help-more-developers-save-time-and-effort/
We&#x27;re hiring.
htttp:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nitrous.io&#x2F;jobs
======
JackFr
I see very little value here. The first angle tries to sell this as a
productivity gain, but the fact that new hires will not be able to start
committing code for 1-2 days is hardly killing companies. Additionally, the
initial setup is a onetime cost which will be amortized over the life of the
employee. Locking into a proprietary ecosystem -- that's the gift that keeps
on giving.

~~~
yid
I agree, and I can't help imagine that there isn't some overselling of the
"seriousness" of the onboarding problem to (probably) non-engineering VCs.

That said, I can see enormous potential in this as an education platform.
Having trouble with you CS homework? Open up Nitrous and get someone far away
to help you out.

~~~
gerbal
I've been using Nitrous.io to teach an intro to python class for non-
programmers (librarians, management, other "Information Professionals"). It's
fantastic to be able to get everyone on the same page and same development
environment from day 1.

The collaboration feature is still too rough to be useful for a novice level
class. Also it gives full access to the collab box with exactly the same
permissions as the box owner. If they add some features and some tools for
gating access and user privileges it will be useful for my class.

~~~
derekdahmer
Agree 100%. I teach a Programming for Non Programmers class using Sinatra.
Typically I'll have all 24 people setup with a "Hello World" app in about 30
minutes.

Even with 2 TAs, I can't even imagine the alternative of trying to get an
entire class of programming newbies running ruby locally across Mac and
Windows without any problems or leaving anyone behind. It's easy as a
developer to underestimate the difficulty of getting things set up. Even in
nitrous the most common problem I have to debug during class is people not
being in the right directory because they have to use 'cd workspace' before
they can 'ruby helloworld.rb'. There's just a giant set of knowledge that we
developers rely on to even do the simplest of tasks, and nitrous lets me skip
over all that boring stuff and get right to the interesting concepts they can
see on their screen like paths, params, request handlers, views and links.

My only complaint is the onboarding UX uses some confusing wording/concepts
for beginners like "boxes" and "hostnames" and energy credits. I just handhold
everyone through that part so it must be really difficult for someone trying
to load it up themselves. When I found some bugs I had the chance to talk with
the guys behind nitrous and they were really helpful with trying to figure out
what went wrong and how they can simplify the flow, so hopefully we'll see
some improvements there with the new round of funding.

------
Mc_Big_G
The pain of setting up your development environment is not something to be
avoided. Not only will you gain a better understanding of how everything
actually works, you might also uncover some outdated documentation which you
can update.

------
debian3
I would like to know where their numbers come from?

"The thing that excites us about the education space is that today, a lot of
people are teaching children and adults how to code, but at the end of the
day, you still have to have that $2,000 machine."

I don't think you "have to have that $2000 machine" even less in 2014 where
the cost of hardware are lower than ever. But on the other end, I guess they
want those poor student to have to pay for their subscription fee to their
service.

Personally I was using Vagrant, but now we use docker which use less resource
and it take far less than 3 days to setup (probably less than 30 minutes while
you can do something else). I don't disagree with the idea of an IDE in the
browser, but for me, it will be something open source that you can host where
I want.

------
korzun
How is this different from setting up a base development image then cloning it
as AWS/DO instances for new developers?

Obviously there is a bit more to that but moving your private code/etc to yet
another start-up with no security track record sounds like a funny joke to me.

Please don't tell me the Web IDE is a selling point here.

~~~
gerbal
I think the strongest use-case is in education and for novice programmers
trying to learn a language and a web-framework. Not for easing on-boarding in
any size company other than a startup.

------
fiatjaf
Programmers making tools for programmers who makes tools for programmers who
makes tools for programmers.

------
darkpicnic
I've been using Nitrous for three months now. Here's why I stick with it:

1) I don't code offline any more. I have too many languages I work with and
there's too many points of failure that can be easily fixed with a Google
search or StackOverflow. If I'm offline, it's usually a waste of time and most
likely, I should be taking a walk.

2) Having a dev environment that is remote means my computer can completely
fail and in 5 min, I'm deploying production code again. It means I can move
between machines without ANYTHING being different. Leave your work computer at
work, work from a friend's computer, yours, it doesn't matter.

3) You actually have control over your box resources. Cloud9 boxes were
abysmally slow, even though their editor was better. Koding was way too
focused on social and attempting to do too much. Nitrous is simple and fast.

That being said, here is what Nitrous needs to work on:

1) Uptime has been sub-par. They've had problems, especially with US-East,
that have led to me not being able to work. This has been minimal, but enough
to make me concerned.

2) The editor is very minimal. There is no fuzzy searching for files (like in
Sublime), no auto-complete, no code hinting, no error checking other than
really basic stuff, like indentation in Python or broken div tags in HTML.
Having dabbled with Cloud9's editor, which is fantastic, I def think they need
to focus on this.

3) Collaborative editing seems half-baked. Each user has to open the same file
and then press a button "Collab Mode". If either forgets to press the button,
your editing different files. There's also no sharing of console output, so
this means if you are running a script that you are both working on, you both
cannot see the same console output. Probably a pretty tricky problem to
overcome, so I don't totally blame them.

All and all, still really like the service and hope they keep improving.

~~~
gerbal
Right now it seems like Nitrous's team is really focused on improving
stability. And with the apparent rapid growth in scale, that's important.

You are certainly right about the need to improve the editor. While the
minimalism is part of what has kept me on Nitrous (over Cloud9 or others), it
needs massive improvements. It seems to have stagnated for months. CodeMirror
has many, many features which would seem to be fairly easy to integrate into
the IDE, but haven't been.

I hope the next round of hires is more front-end focused.

------
geertj
Do people really think it's a good idea to have an IDE on the web? What do you
do when the network is down, or when you're on the plane, train, etc. And what
if the network is slow?

I think I'll keep my local development workstation for some time.

~~~
korzun
I yet to meet a good engineer takes web IDE's seriously.

~~~
mark_l_watson
I consulted at Google last year and I really liked the internal web based IDE,
and I am sure a lot of people there would agree with me. I was talking to
someone at Google last week and mentioned how much I enjoyed the web IDE, even
in an early form. He said that it is getting more awesome quickly.

~~~
korzun
You can't compare Googles infrastructure to an average start-up without
security team or proper procedures that protect company data.

Not to mention most of the start-ups have shitty uplink with no redundancy.

------
sergiotapia
I've used Nitrous when it was called something else (I can't remember what it
was) and it was a great idea but the editor felt really slow and odd use.

It couldn't even autocomplete HTML closing tags. That's a major point against
it for my use cases.

Another alternative is: [https://koding.com/](https://koding.com/) but they
are also really slow. I'm going to give Nitrous another try for my Go
development, it may have gotten better.

~~~
gerbal
Nitrous used to be Action.io. The editor is still lacking features, but
responsiveness has improved. Right now the Nitrous team seems more interested
in expanding supported tool chains and languages than in improving the IDE
experience.

------
whistlerbrk
I don't like being negative about things like this.. but you're not removing a
learning curve with something like this, you are delaying it and spreading it
out over time with interest payments - the time spent going back and learning
fundamentals - along the way.

Setting up your own development environment is an absolute must. It is the
computing world's mise en place.

------
ericraio
If a new hire can not set up their own machine in 1-2 days of time then the
new hire should not have been hired.

I like to customize my text editor to fit my work flow, a text editor on the
web gives me no control. I like having control over my environment and it is
usually a "set it, forget it" mentality.

~~~
runako
Welcome to the Starship Enterprise. I have yet to see an enterprise dev stack
that a competent developer can get up and running in a day, without "cheating"
by being given a VM or preloaded laptop. Lots of reasons:

\- the setup process isn't documented

\- the stack isn't documented

\- the above are documented, but the documents are a year old and obsolete

\- sample data? Go ask Jim on 3. Jim doesn't work here anymore.

\- etc.

------
Mtinie
Simplistically, it seems like this is something that a team could do for
themselves using tools like Vagrant (with Packer and/or Ansible), individual
user licenses for Sublime Text, and a Github account.

Host the newly created development VM locally, or on AWS, Azure, or
DigitalOcean and you're good to go.

Sure, that's a couple of tools and subscriptions (that you'll likely already
need/have, even if you use Nitrous.io), but I'm not quite sure I quite get
what benefit Nitrous.io would provide over a company-maintained and
customizable deployment "solution".

For a team that is starting with a blank-slate, maybe it's a short-cut and
easier to maintain?

~~~
j_s
For Windows devs, there's [http://boxstarter.org/](http://boxstarter.org/)

~~~
voltagex_
Is this just a more configurable version of Ninite? I couldn't see any mention
of available packages on the site.

~~~
j_s
The packages available would be those provided by Chocolatey:
[https://chocolatey.org/packages](https://chocolatey.org/packages)

Chocolatey takes the NuGet tooling used to extend Visual Studio and uses the
same approach to manage installing random software. BoxStarter then builds on
all these ideas to take care of the initial setup of a machine.

If you just want a bigger ninite, check out
[http://allmyapps.com/](http://allmyapps.com/)

------
mark_l_watson
I have had a nitrous.io (before action.o) account for a long time. They have a
very slick developer experience.

If you are skeptical about browser development, there are three good counter
examples: Google's internal system, nitrous.io, and fpcomplete.com (for
Haskell). I find all three excellent.

For nitrous.io, one of the big wins is having many options for instant on
development environments. It pairs well with github and Heroku.

~~~
mark_l_watson
One more comment on nitrous.io: I would use it more often but I have a
difficult time reading white text on a black background and there is no
styling option to use different themes. I asked about this, but the response
was not promising.

fpcomplete.com (for Haskell) does not have this problem.

------
berto99
This could be a good teaching tool for people new to development. Rather than
setting up a bunch of vm's, just use nitrous and code in the browser...and as
they become better, they can start using ssh and so on. Could also be
interesting as an enterprise offer.

------
nickstinemates
There's some interesting tech powering nitrous.io, having seen an early
example of it around 7 months ago.

I like the experience, but personally do not use it as it deviates too heavily
from my normal development process.

------
wehadfun
I think a web ide would be great if an organization could host it themself.
Hell I would even by one if I could put it on my own webserver

~~~
mark_l_watson
I agree, but lots of people trust github with their proprietary code. Indeed,
when I do use nitrous.io, it is with github repos.

