How much do I rely on GitHub Codespaces for open source development? Super double-plus much. I can illustrate exactly how much with one short anecdote.

Gulp 5 was recently released and I created several PRs across repos in the H5BP organization to update Gulp across the board. I missed one issue with the encoding of images in the HTML5-Boilerplate repo and had to create a patch PR to address that one issue. Christian Oliff found an issue with failing tests with the PR on a Windows 11 machine.

This morning I decided to take a look at the issue. While, as I mentioned, I mostly use Codepsaces these days; I still have a local clone of HTML5 Boilerplate. So, I pulled down 44 commits and got to work.

As you do with an npm-based project, I ran `npm install` to make sure the dependencies were up to date.

PS C:\Users\rob\code\html5-boilerplate> npm install
npm : The term 'npm' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was 
included, verify that the path is correct and try again.
At line:1 char:1
+ npm install
+ ~~~
    + CategoryInfo          : ObjectNotFound: (npm:String) [], CommandNotFoundException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : CommandNotFoundException
 
PS C:\Users\rob\code\html5-boilerplate> 

Oops? Yes, oops.

What’s going on there? Node/npm is my bread-and-butter environment, right? Absolutely. So? Huh?

Here’s the deal- I have a new Surface Studio 2 that I bought in December and I, apparently, never had any need to install Node/npm on this laptop. As my GitHub profile shows I’ve actually done a fair bit of open source work this year so it’s not down to the fact that I’ve been dormant. I just have done everything in Codepsaces. They’re so convenient I never even think about working locally. It took a specific Windows 11 bug to get me working locally on this laptop.

So, yeah, Codepsaces rock.

If you’re wondering, I did fix the issue with the tests and will be releasing v9.0.1 of H5BP tomorrow or Friday.