Collaborative Workspaces

There has been explosive innovation for collaborative work online: Figma for design, Notion for wikis, Google Docs for writing, FigJam for brainstorming, to name a few. As teams are increasingly working remotely, these tools are re-defining the future of how we do work, together.

GitHub already facilitates collaboration, but only starting after code has been pushed to Git. Can we also help when and where the work happens: while the code is being written?

Collaborative development comes in many forms, and many companies are innovating heavily in this space. A common pattern is multiple cursors — our team uses Visual Studio Code’s Live Share extension often. With some configuration, this is available in Codespaces today:

At the end of the day, though, this is only an incremental update to our existing workflow. Developer collaboration (like pair programming) involves more than simultaneously typing into the same text buffer; it involves a broad and real-time exchange of context and knowledge, both of which can be spread out amongst teams, codebases, and projects.

By looking at how developers currently work, we can start to shed light on these many facets of collaboration.

What might a typical feature development workflow look like?

First, they need to clone the repository to their machine and install all the requisite dependencies.

Once they have the project locally, they can work solely from their text editor, right?

Well, they also need the specifications for the given feature...

And the design...

And they need to coordinate with their team to stay on track (maybe daily standups and sitdowns).

While they're working, they need to look up documentation for third-party packages that are being used.

They need to take notes...

...and set up Zoom calls to walk through parts of the code.

And finally, they can ship the feature!

A month later, they need to add to that feature...

So they dig around and find all of these resources again.

This is a lot of context to keep track of. And this context needs to be dug up every time the feature is worked on, for every developer working on it! Every project has a huge amount of context behind it and there’s no standard place to or way of storing this information.

What if we combined all of these things into one space?

Against the backdrop of a proliferation of real-time collaborative tools, GitHub has an opportunity to redefine its motto, "social coding." Developers worldwide are already moving their entire working environments to the browser via Codespaces; a natural enhancement to this movement would be the addition of real-time collaborative and project-planning features.

Workspaces

Adding support for authentication

Open to all

https://wattenberger-githubocto-flat-r565j7ghpg6x.github.dev/

We already have Codespaces

Imagine if every Codespace was a "Workspace", with information about who was working on that feature. And whether they were actively working right now.

And layered into that Workspace, we have a few default plugins. These plugins help organize the context for the work - the "natural emissions" that are created while working.

For example, we can have a References plugin that helps us keep track of important links.

Or we could have a Tasks plugin for easily breaking the work down into smaller steps. These could hook into GitHub Issues for better integration into the main platform.

Or we could have a Notes plugin for quick notes — things that are handy to know, but not important or persistent enough to add to linked Issues. Developers often have scratchpads for this kind of ephemeral information. Let’s bring that into our workspace.

Now that we have a unified workspace, we can easily share all of that context and work in collaboration.

What if this space was easily shareable and put collaboration first?

You can imagine a workflow where you can see what space everyone is working in (on an organization page, repository page, or on, say, dev.github.com):

If you find something you want to work on, click it to instantly open the space:

Workspaces

Adding support for authentication

Open to all

https://wattenberger-githubocto-flat-r565j7ghpg6x.github.dev/

Once inside the space, you can see what task your teammates are tackling:

And chat with them about the current state of the project:

You can code together on the same task, or move to a different part of the codebase and tackle another task.

For more info on this visualization, see our writeup on Visualizing a codebase.

With all of the context for a project in one place, it’s natural to enable meaningful collaboration: work on the entire project together.

With this foundation of a unified place to work, we’ll be able to build even higher:

What if this space was easily extensible?

For newer coders or for small projects, having basic tools built-in lets them jump right into the work! Create a repo and start a workspace - it’s as easy as that!

For those teams who want more complex tools or want to integrate with external services, we can expose a structured API for creating new plugins.

Workspaces

Adding support for authentication

Open to all

https://wattenberger-githubocto-flat-r565j7ghpg6x.github.dev/

Imagine a plugin that helps with managing packages - making their documentation accessible right next to your code.

Or the community could create a plugin for recording audio and code navigation - making walkthroughs and explanations easy.

Or the community could create a plugin for listing the imports and functions in a file - making it easy to handle imports and organizing code.

By allowing end users to extend what their Workspace is capable of, we can provide a foundation for enabling an endless number of workflows.

Wrap-up

Once the context around a feature or project is unified in one place, we can make that workspace easily shareable, easily extensible, and a medium for meaningful collaboration.

We would love to see other explorations or hear your thoughts! Tweet us at @GitHubNext or send us an email at [email protected].