Agreed. I've seen this referred to as inner loop (local dev environment and work flow) and outer loop (deployment, production, etc). A team needs to optimize both loops, though each should have slightly different priorities in terms of speed, safety mechanics, etc.
The importance of local development
31–40 of 94 posts
Re: The importance of local development
#32Local development works great ... until it doesn't. And then getting it to scale past a certain point is excruciating. My favorite argument against local development, however, is that isolation is a bug, not a feature. When I want to show another developer what I've built, or get help debugging an issue, I don't want to have to call them over to my laptop or do a screensharing session. I want them to have access to t…
Great point, and you're right that's easier if it's already cloud-based. But with ngrok-type utiltities (and good old SSH) there's nothing stopping us from saying "hey, check out this weird bug on my local instance -- here's the url/ssh hotsname." The downside is that it's often harder to spin up multiple locals than multiple cloud instances, and so it's harder to publish a url for the team to play around with for a day ("I'm building this new feature, but I'm not sure about the UX, what do you think?"). But IMHO the benefit of being able to nuke and recreate a dev environment in seconds (rather than the ~10mins it sometimes takes for a cloudsql instance to spin up) is worth it.
Re: The importance of local development
#33I do think most of the comments here are missing the core point, which isn't so much about whether your development environment is running on your laptop or on the cloud, but more that it's possible to stand up your own environment with a functional version of your product. It's distressingly common that this isn't possible, and you can only test and integrate your code in a single shared development environment, or…
We worked like this for 5 years, and the highlight of the new project we’re finally starting is to keep it all reproductible from the start.
It’s a constant fight though.
Re: The importance of local development
#34Local development is extremely common in my area because the tooling is so good (dotnet).
However the most productive I've been was on a team where local development, even on a single service, was eschewed for the most part. We had tests that would cover 90+% of the codebase - more importantly nearly 100% of what was worth testing - and would routinely deploy things into staging from master that had never even been executed as a whole app, let alone run in anger and tested with live dependencies. The coverage was good enough that everything actually held together really well.
I'd never shipped anything that efficiently prior or since, it totally changed my view of TDD as being a time-consuming but safe and conservative regime vs my experience of it dramatically speeding up iteration.
The only thing that started gnawing at my brain (while admittedly operating a far lesser sized constellation of distributed services than, say, Facebook) was that there is no way of unit testing (or even statically verifying with TLA+ or something) the wider-scale structure of services, at least that I'm aware of. At some point I might knock something together involving specs and code generation but I dunno.
Re: The importance of local development
#35Thanks to Docker, whenever I start a new project or team, I always ensure that everything can be run locally (the DB, Redis, services, website, and mobile app). But it's hard to be disciplined, especially when reproducing bugs, so developers usually end up using a "shared" test server.
Also, these days, I use Cloudflare more and more. They're very affordable, and deployment is a breeze for the simplest cases. But local development seems to be an afterthought. I built a service that uses some of their dev offerings. Some work locally (using Miniflare), and some can only work remotely (dev environment in your Cloudflare account). Imagine when you need both kinds of offerings!
Re: The importance of local development
#36Whenever I see a flake.nix in a project I'm more likely to contribute because I know I'm not going to get stuck in dependency hell before I can even test a single change.
Reproducible builds are what I've found to be the most important part of any local dev experience; standing up local databases, message queues etc required for whatever is being developed has always been relatively simple in comparison.
Re: The importance of local development
#37I live by this principle: If it takes you more than 30 seconds to test a change, you're going to have a huge productivity drain. 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. S…
I find it irritating when a program's compile time is perceptible. In compiled languages, TCC (Tiny C Compiler) was the only one that came close, though it doesn't seem to be great for production use. This made me switch back to JS and Python. The frictionlessness of "I made this change and I see the result in the same breath" is very compelling to me. Fortunately there are fast TypeScript compilers now, which make t…
I view JS as necessary because of the Web but honestly I don't like doing Python for anything serious because it's a dynamic language and I don't want to write unit tests for spelling mistakes. I realize it's the tool of choice for AI/ML/DS (for good reasons).
But I'm with you on fast compilation and at Google this was the case, even with C++. There was a ton of infrastructure made around this that wouldn't be easy to replicate but I could certainly compile and run a C++ unit test in <20 seconds most of the time.
Re: The importance of local development
#38I go back and forth on this. On the one hand, maintaining local development environments that work reliably across larger team if developers is a HUGE cost in terms of time and effort. Developers are amazing at breaking their environments in unexpected ways. It’s common for teams to lose many hours a week to problems related to this. So I love the idea of cloud-based development environments where, if something break…
Devbox aims to solve this very problem: https://www.jetify.com/devbox
Re: The importance of local development
#39Re: The importance of local development
#40We went remote-only dev years ago; definitely never going back. It's such a pleasure to always have the same stuff everywhere, no matter what and on any device.