[nkohari]

I spent 4.5 years at Stripe, and left in March.

The biggest difference not mentioned is the article is that code is no longer kept on developer machines. The sync process described in the article was well-designed, but also was a fairly constant source of headaches. (For example, sometimes the file watcher would miss an update and the code on your remote machine would be broken in strange ways, and you'd have to recognize that it was a sync issue instead of an actual problem with your code.) As a result, the old devbox system was superseded by "remote devboxes", which also host the code. Engineers use VSCode remote development via SSH. It works shockingly well for a codebase the size of Stripe's.

There are actually several different monorepos at Stripe, which is a constant source of frustration. There have been lots of efforts to try to unify the codebase into a single git repo, but it was difficult for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was the "main" monorepo was already testing the limits of the solution used for git hosting.

Overall, maintaining good developer productivity is an extremely challenging problem. This is especially true for a company like Stripe, which is both too large to operate as a "small" company and too small to operate as a "big" company. Even with a well-funded team of lots of super talented people putting forth their best efforts, it's tough to keep all of the wheels fully greased.

[cynicalpeace]

Glad to see that they moved to code living with the execution environment. The code living separate from the execution environment seemed like too much overhead and complexity for not enough benefit.

Especially given VSCode, or Cursor ;), work so well via ssh.

To the engineers that don't want to use those IDE's it might suck temporarily, but that's it.

[jcmfernandes]

Thanks for this. Can you share the experience of those who don't use VS Code?

[tail_exchange]

IntelliJ is also supported. If you want to use something else, like VIM, then you need to ssh into the remote devbox machine. They have support for custom dotfiles, so you can set up your cool VIM environment for all your remote devboxes.

If you don't want remote devboxes, the regular devboxes still work. You just need to deal with the additional pain for syncing the files.