The importance of local development

The JankStack in which one piles Python environment jank on top of Ubuntu/Darwin jank, and piles Docker jank on top of the previous, and piles Docker Compose jank on the previous, until you finally arrive at Jank-As-A-Service via something like ECS or EKS gives a terrifyingly comforting illusion of such with roughly the risk profile of speedballing hard drugs while simultaneously free climbing El Capitan. It has the nice ancillary benefit of subsidizing some combination of mega-yachts and private space programs, so that's cool I guess.

Sooner or later you're going to link CUDA, or glibc, or some other thing that just doesn't play like that. And then your are capital-F fucked if you didn't invest early on in some heavy-metal hermitic shit and some Gazed into a Palantir foresight around feature flags.

* in every single case I’ve seen, the developers who broke their local environments that badly had significant skill deficits which affected their general productivity. Investing in training paid dividends far beyond not having to deal with their local environment getting hosed since they also stopped creating massive security and performance problems in production.

* building a cloud-based development where someone can refresh it automatically means you’ve identified a reliable process for installing and configuring everything. That same process can be run locally, probably using the same container definitions for everything except the parts they’re focused on.

That means writing a test should be easy and running it should be fast (including any compilation steps). As soon as something takes more than 30 seconds, you've lost a lot of people. They've switched tabs. They're on HN or reddit or they've pulled out their phone.

You've broken the flow.

Some people can work effectively in an environment where it takes 1-10+ minutes to build something and then you run enough code to test a bunch of changes at once. You might even have multiple clients open at once and you switch between. This doesn't suit me and it doesn't suit a lot of people I've worked with.

Where does local storage fit in? Any test you write will probably need data. You don't want to mock out your data storage. You just want to use the same API and have it be backed by a hash map (or whatever) and have it easy to populate that with data.

Once you have that, local data for something interactive like a website becomes a natural extension.

Attempting to do all of this on the local machine will mostly work, but it fails to exercise a lot of the networking concerns (public IP detection, port assignment, etc.), and weird edges crop up as latency grows beyond 0ms. It also makes it impossible to test with other players on other LANs without reaching for complicated networking setups that add even more confusion when things go wrong.

I could write a bunch of bandaid "if editor attached" code throughout, but I also like the idea that I am testing the final thing on the ~final hardware and there isn't going to be any weird dragon fight after this.