What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #295

Developers, developers, developers - Microsoft's massive developer reach + what's next for enterprise adoption

Jun 25, 2022

This week was all about the battle of AI code generators as both Github Co-Pliot and AWS Code Whisperer were launched.

Here’s more on CodeWhisperer from TechCrunch :

The company notes that the system continuously examines your code and comments and even takes your own coding style and variable names into account. Using this contextual information — and where your cursor is — it’ll then generate its own custom code snippets.
It’s worth noting that CodeWhisperer does some things different from the likes of Copilot. For one, while most of the code that the system generates is novel, every time it generates code that is close to an existing snippet in its training data, it will note that and highlight the license of that original function. It’s then up to the developer to decide whether to use it or not. This should alleviate some (though maybe not all) of the copyright concerns that maybe come with using a tool like this.

and more on GitHub Copilot from the Verge:

More than 1.2 million developers signed up to use the GitHub Copilot preview over the past 12 months…In files where it’s enabled, GitHub says nearly 40 percent of code is now being written by Copilot.

Regardless of your thoughts on the future of AI and code, those are big numbers for the early days of Copilot which leads me to my next point - Microsoft is an absolute juggernaut when it comes to developers, developers, developers.

Here’s data from StackOverflow’s annual Developer Survey for 2022 which just came out showing Microsoft’s market share for IDEs with VS Code #1.

I also found this great fireside chat with Amanda Silver, Head of Product, Microsoft Developer Division, and Thomas Dhomke, CEO of Github from June 14. While this is pro-Microsoft, I do encourage you to watch or read the transcript as they lay out a big vision for what large enterprises are buying…developer productivity, onboarding and instant productivity, workload move to cloud, and shift ⬅️ security.

Amanda Silver: We have 31 million developers that use a Visual Studio product every month to develop applications. And in a lot of ways, the wind is at our backs. There's been incredible growth over the last few years. The Visual Studio family growth is up over 60% over the last 18 months.

So it's also a really exciting moment in time for the developer community because what we're seeing is that developer workloads themselves are actually moving into the cloud. This is a huge shift for companies that are more traditional companies that have managed their own on premises software and hosting their developer infrastructure. So this is a huge opportunity for us as well. And so what we're trying to do is to basically build tools and platforms that will make it easier to migrate that developer workload into the cloud so that it makes it easier for developers to go from their idea to the code, and then ultimately from that code to the cloud.

And from Thomas Dhomke, CEO of GitHub - 83 million is a lot of devs…

Thomas Dhomke: In 2018 when we announce the GitHub acquisition, GitHub was at 28 million developers and we are now at 83 million developers with over 4 million organizations, 90% of the Fortune 100. But really, every developer has some dependency on GitHub. We see that oftentimes when GitHub has a technical issue, how many people really depend on GitHub because they're frustrated about it. And they're frustrated because they want to download a package from GitHub, they want to download a dependency, they want to install a new version of the Linux operating system, and somehow in that process is a dependency on GitHub. So really, every developer is a GitHub customer, and that obviously comes with a huge responsibility for us, but also with a huge opportunity for us.

On security:

Thomas: So we want to shift this left from the production environment to the pull request, and even further left into the editor where the developer quickly, while writing code, can apply best practices, can use Copilot to get suggestions about better code. And then when they send the pull request, the pull request captures, it's the first line of defense running checks, running CICD, running code and secrets, making sure the developer has not made a mistake using pair programming and code reviewers to have a human, second and third pair of eyes, look at this, and then finally merging into the main branch and then deploying to production. So security really is underlying everything we do.

And with GitHub Advanced Security, GitHub Copilot and Codespaces. And I forgot to mention with Codespaces, obviously if your dev environment moves to the cloud, you can apply exactly the same practices that you have in your production environment as in CICD, automatic dependency updates, nightly builds. All of that you can apply to your dev environment so you no longer have to run behind hundreds of developers making sure they have updated their tools, sent them emails saying, "If you don't upgrade to VS22 or some dependency library or whatnot, you're behind in the security workflow.

Developer speed with enterprise governance and compliance

Amanda: So it's basically the integration platform as a service. How do you take all of these different APIs that are available, developed inside of your company, developed in the public market that you might use externally, developed by other developers out there, how do I assemble all of these things so that I can modernize the systems that I have so that I can create new applications more quickly, and how can I make sure that I'm providing governance and compliance to make sure that any time that I'm calling an API, I have the confidence that the right people are accessing the data that that API has access to. And so in a sense, our huge opportunity here is to marry the experience of our developer tools to our Azure business, where we can take the huge momentum that we've built up with both GitHub and Visual Studio and introduce developers to what we can offer with Azure?

Where the big 💰 is:

Amanda Silver: Yeah. I think what's so exciting about the next chapter that we're in is that we're seeing enterprises really want to become more agile and we're seeing the cost of a startup dramatically decreasing because there's so many existing building blocks that are already there in terms of your engineering systems, what it takes to actually outfit a development team, as well as the building blocks for hosting and assembling the applications that you ultimately want to build. And so that means that also startups can scale like an enterprise really quickly. And so I think this is just an era where we're going to see incredible amounts of productivity.

Also nice 🧵 here…