Simplify how your teams work! Using shared configurations and underlying tools makes onboarding new developers easier and removes friction from the development process. In this talk, we examine using GitHub Codespaces for capturing base development environment requirements, integrating tools such as precommit and checkov, integrated custom CodeSpaces image management, OS edge cases, and isolated/confidential uses.

Relevance: The flexibility and power of Codespaces allows individual developers and teams alike to make starting a new project easier as well as collaborating on improvements to shared developer environment configurations. This leads to faster onboarding and lowers the bar to being productive in a software development project.

Case Studies or Examples: The primary example is centered around developer onboarding and time to productivity. Many regulated industries struggle with securing containerized technologies for their developers when their technology is extremely locked down or even air-gapped. Having ways to enable collaborative functionality (Codespaces and consequently DevContainers) makes this more attainable while still giving risk and compliance teams peace of mind. Another example is OS usage. Not everyone uses Ubuntu, Debian, or Alpine. There are segments that work exclusively with CentOS for legacy support but switched to RHEL or a similar Linux flavor, and support for that in the devcontainer features ecosystem is not at parity with Ubuntu/Debian.

Key Takeaways:
- Discover simple, as well as advanced, methods for streamlining configuration to facilitate developer productivity
- Gain insights into off-label or divergent use cases related to custom Codespaces images, configurations, and features
- Understand how to position themselves to have conversations with other teams on how to implement this functionality while still maintaining a secure and compliant posture