Many Eclipse projects chose to host their source code on GitHub. GitHub's blend of quick forks, pull requests, and easy communication certainly has benefits for communities, collaboration, and ultimately: contributions.
Before a person can contribute, however, they need to go through the tedious work of git-clone, install and configure the right tools and services, and compile. It can take several minutes to hours. It can make people say: "Contribute? Oh well, not today".
What if we could reduce this to one click of a hyperlink and 5 seconds?
In this presentation, I will show how this is possible when running Eclipse Theia in the cloud.
I will explain the concept of "dev environment as code" and how it can automate tedious setup instructions from contributions guides, from installing the right tools, to downloading dependencies and compiling your source code.
Also I will show how this can be integrated with GitHub, so that the heavy download+compile work can be completed *before* a contributor opens the Theia IDE on your project.
In the demo, I will be using gitpod.io as an example for a hosted offering of Eclipse Theia.