The importance of local development
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The importance of local development
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Re: The importance of local development
#2I 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 breaks, a developer can click a button on a website, wait a few minutes and have a fresh working environment ready to go again.
But… modern laptops are getting SO fast now. It’s increasingly difficult to provide a cloud-based environment that’s remotely as performant as a M2 or M3 laptop.
Re: The importance of local development
#3You can't run Facebook on a laptop either.
Re: The importance of local development
#4Local 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 the same machine that I have access to, with the same data and configuration, and having cloud-based dev boxes enables that.
Re: The importance of local development
#5I 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…
can you have a central conda install? or zip a full conda env?
with nixos, you can have a single default.nix and serve from a binary cache.
Re: The importance of local development
#6I 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…
Docker makes it really easy
Re: The importance of local development
#7Not having a local development env is a total productivity burner for me.
Re: The importance of local development
#8[deleted]
Re: The importance of local development
#9I 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…
What about local development precludes having a consistent, repeatable development environment? At worst you can distribute an environment the same way you would on the cloud.
Re: The importance of local development
#10I 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…
Docker makes it really easy
This. Locally, we run the apps/services in our IDEs and all the supporting infra runs in Docker via docker compose: messaging systems, databases, caches, etc.
This has the added benefit of ensuring that developers don't interfere with each other during development. Your Kafka messages will only be picked up by your processes. Your database changes don't impact anyone else until they're pushed.