Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cloud development environments tame complexity by reducing state

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 42 posts

Re: Cloud development environments tame complexity by reducing state

#11

Post by gryBrd1987 »

0xCMP wrote: post #6

I agree and it's why I personally invest so much time with things like Nix. Nix offers a solution to being able to do a "cloud development environment", but on your local computer. It also allows you to easily setup the cloud development environment if you need one. While Docker works for setting up a new instance in a cloud provider, on a mac is a major pain so I don't really see it as a proper solution to the thing…

Nah the final version is chips with a massive data model and algorithmic magic embedded in silicon magic to bootstrap an environment that samples the data model to answer user questions.

A ways off, but some colleagues in the hardware world are working out the requirements on paper. Maybe right as I type this, not really tracking their calendar.

There will be some wiggle room for general programming, patches, hands on customization by the user.

Software is a decades long bubble to help us discover optimal machine state models we can etch into chips.

So long as we can avoid social collapse or species extinction between now than then anyway :)

Re: Cloud development environments tame complexity by reducing state

#12

Post by taeric »

Rigidly defined development environments breed fragile systems. They are enticing, for often rapid onboarding of new developers. However, not having the churn of letting new people onboard their setup to the system loses on an anti fragile mechanism.

This is ignoring the removal of control from your developers. Autonomy of tool choice is an amazing boon to job satisfaction.

Which is not to say that a cloud environment should not be used. Just don't homogenize the setup.

Re: Cloud development environments tame complexity by reducing state

#13

Post by cercatrova »

tuatoru wrote: post #2

Writing on Medium tames readership by requiring accounts of readers. The essay is probably interesting, but I'll never know.

I use this extension (works on Chrome and Firefox, maybe Safari too) to bypass paywalls, works great.

https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean

Re: Cloud development environments tame complexity by reducing state

#14

Post by nordsieck »

taeric wrote: post #12

Rigidly defined development environments breed fragile systems. They are enticing, for often rapid onboarding of new developers. However, not having the churn of letting new people onboard their setup to the system loses on an anti fragile mechanism. This is ignoring the removal of control from your developers. Autonomy of tool choice is an amazing boon to job satisfaction. Which is not to say that a cloud environmen…

> Rigidly defined development environments breed fragile systems. They are enticing, for often rapid onboarding of new developers. However, not having the churn of letting new people onboard their setup to the system loses on an anti fragile mechanism.

> This is ignoring the removal of control from your developers. Autonomy of tool choice is an amazing boon to job satisfaction.

> Which is not to say that a cloud environment should not be used. Just don't homogenize the setup.

IMO, there is a good middle ground.

I agree with you on stuff like editor/ide and base OS. But I think there can be great advantages to having everyone do development in docker/VM such that the environment matches prod.

Re: Cloud development environments tame complexity by reducing state

#15

Post by drunkenmagician »

buscoquadnary wrote: post #7
drunkenmagician wrote: post #5

TL;DR Use cloud based development environments to avoid machine (developer) specific, non reproducible problems, and increase productivity (speculatively) Probably ok for certain needs, but not something I would use. My productivity comes from a localised and personalised setup. Issues with the local or remote environments IMHO, indicate a problems that 1) others may also encounter. 2) should at least, if possible be…

Isn't that what the promise of Docker was, you can distribute the docker image and everyone is running and building the same thing?

I would have thought so too ... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Cloud development environments tame complexity by reducing state

#16

Post by taeric »

nordsieck wrote: post #14
taeric wrote: post #12

Rigidly defined development environments breed fragile systems. They are enticing, for often rapid onboarding of new developers. However, not having the churn of letting new people onboard their setup to the system loses on an anti fragile mechanism. This is ignoring the removal of control from your developers. Autonomy of tool choice is an amazing boon to job satisfaction. Which is not to say that a cloud environmen…

> Rigidly defined development environments breed fragile systems. They are enticing, for often rapid onboarding of new developers. However, not having the churn of letting new people onboard their setup to the system loses on an anti fragile mechanism. > This is ignoring the removal of control from your developers. Autonomy of tool choice is an amazing boon to job satisfaction. > Which is not to say that a cloud envi…

I think letting people do this is awesome. I think standardizing on it would be a huge mistake.

In particular, I think local deployment is important. And having freedom in all local deploys leads to finding the small details that matter.

Especially since you probably do not own the full prod tech stack, you are behooved by having proof that you can change it.

And, by all means, make the best attempt you can. I am arguing that somewhat purposely breaking it in a regular basis with each new developer makes you more resilient if you have to do a change in prod someday. And you will, someday.

Re: Cloud development environments tame complexity by reducing state

#20

Post by [deleted] »

drunkenmagician wrote: post #5

TL;DR Use cloud based development environments to avoid machine (developer) specific, non reproducible problems, and increase productivity (speculatively) Probably ok for certain needs, but not something I would use. My productivity comes from a localised and personalised setup. Issues with the local or remote environments IMHO, indicate a problems that 1) others may also encounter. 2) should at least, if possible be…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN