Duolingo

Language app simplifies onboarding and makes it easier to collaborate with cloud-based coding tools.

If all the code is living on everybody's laptops, then eventually people install weird things or they break their configuration somehow and need to figure out how to fix them. I'm the one who led that movement and we didn't want to force feed it to people. While pair programming or pair coding isn’t a prevalent part of the development culture at Duolingo, if it were to become more common, Codespaces would be a natural fit. This has reduced the time taken to set up the main code base from days or even a week, down to just seven or eight minutes to spin up a new Codespace. We use Tailscale for accessing our private resources locally on our laptops, where we rely on our old VPN to secure certain private resources on AWS and the local office server. If one of the team wants to use it, they can, but it's not a requirement. There are currently just over 100 engineers using Codespaces and Tailscale, which is a little over a third of Duolingo’s engineering organization. It was a trial by fire, you’d spend your first couple days or even your first week at Duolingo just setting up your laptop, installing all the tools and the library software packages that you need to write code. When we work in Codespaces, the code is actually not on our computer at all. It even came with code samples that I could easily adapt to our use case, which was far ahead of the others. Duolingo started using GitHub Codespaces around a year ago, which allowed its engineers to carry out their work in the cloud. For engineering teams needing secure access to dynamic hosts, services and applications, VPNs are the answer.