Comment by crystaln | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crystaln | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

A few months ago my Macbook Pro screen cracked while I was on a road trip. I thought I was screwed, but decided to try development on a Chromebook I had lying around.

That was when I discovered AWS Cloud 9. After getting back my repaired fully maxed out latest model Macbook Pro, I have not even bothered to restore the hard drive. Developing on Cloud 9 has been wonderful. Having everything already in the cloud in a production-like environment has enormous advantages. Sure there are things I occasionally may miss or be unable to do on a Chromebook, though this has surprisingly not been an issue yet. The only Mac app I've wanted to use is Sketch.

I have since upgraded to a Pixelbook, which has a gorgeous screen and a superior keyboard to a Macbook Pro. Touch screens with tablet mode make a computer enormously more versatile, serving as a tablet and media platform. If I lose or damage my Chromebook, I can continue development seemlessly on any computer, and log in to any Chromebook to recover my environment. Not having a $3000 laptop that I need to protect with my life, knowing that if I lose everything nothing is lost, is very liberating.

I'm now transitioning off of iOS because of the lack of iMessage and the general pointlessness of using an iPhone with a Chromebook. Perhaps the biggest annoyance with iOS devices now is the disastrous Lightning connector, which adds so much complication to my cable environment. With a Pixel 2, I basically just need a few similar wall chargers and USB-C cables rather than a tangle of converters and cables.

Surprising myself, I am now basically committed to a future on Chrome OS and Google's ecosystem. My only regret is not supporting Apple's respect for privacy, which is a substantial regret. I can only hope our Google and perhaps government some day will adopt Apple's ethical standards around privacy.

Anyone want to buy a Macbook Pro? It really is a beautiful machine. I just don't seem to need it anymore.

I love coding on dual 4K screens powered by my laptop. How does a web-based Cloud 9 work on dual 4K screens? Can a Chromebook power dual 4K screens that are external?

I currently run an XPS 9560 but am waiting now for a 9570. Laptops are definitely replacing desktops even for high powered tasks, but I am not sure Chromebooks have the horsepower yet.

The other place that Chromebook's fall down is when traveling. Lots of places like airplains, trains have spotting wifi/cell coverage. With a Chromebook you are dead in the water. If you spent a lot of time traveling, not being able to work is sort of a bummer.

I use a single 4k screen. Most Chromebooks have no problem with this. I have not tried dual 4k screens, however I think a Pixelbook is capable of this.

One thing I've discovered is that much screen real estate is overkill for me, and I'm more productive with less.

> Having everything already in the cloud in a production-like environment has enormous advantages.

Could you talk about this a little more? I have never used C9. I use git and an IDE on multiple devices (Linux on home desktop, Windows on old ass laptop, macOS at work) so I can work in basically the same environment on any of those devices any time. Granted, I can’t just pull up a browser on any device, but that seems like it would be a rare use case (for me, anyway).

Sounds like you don’t need that MacBook anymore, wanna sell it to me cheap? (:

In reality those environments are not "the same". You have all sorts of libraries that are compiled and set up specifically for your system, and those differences add up.

With Cloud 9 everything is on an EC2 instance with Linux, exactly the same platform as I will deploy in production.

True. My environments are not the same. Most will call that a disadvantage. I rather like knowing about environments on various platforms and how my applications support them. Of course there are other, probably better, ways to approach that (:

It sounds like C9 can be really useful for AWS deployment specifically, but beyond that I don’t see much value over git+IDE.

The value is that it is online on an ec2 instance on the Aws network , which may or may not be something you want.

Also git+IDE is exactly what I use with Cloud 9. C9 is the IDE.

But why not just use VMWare with Linux locally?

In context of this thread, because aws works with Chromebooks and VMware doesn't.

Funny enough, with Google releasing Debian on Chrome OS, this may actually become an option soon.

We're way past the point where you need to guard your laptop with your life because you'll lose everything, as he puts it. Anyone who isn't already backed up to at least 1 cloud service is stuck in the last decade.

Replacing the hardware and restoring your environment is expensive and time consuming, sometimes prohibitively so. Let's say you're on a road trip through Mexico...

Also backing up a Macbook to the cloud is a lot of data, and Apple doesn't have an adequate solution for this. I was using Backblaze. Their restore method is mailing a USB drive.

Unless you have a local backup, which is not practical while traveling, restoring from backup is non-trivial.

> Anyone who isn't already backed up to at least 1 cloud service is stuck in the last decade.

Are finances not a concern here, or am I missing something else with this suggestion? I don't backup _anything_ to a cloud provider because my last-decades solutions (automation + home network NAS or SAN at work) _just works_, and I, and my company, don't need the recurring costs hit from a cloud provider.

> Are finances not a concern here, or am I missing something else with this suggestion?

Sounds like a little of both to me.

At home I keep my backups on a NAS with RAID 1 redundancy so I'm tolerant to most things. That entire 4TB array is backed up to the cloud through BackBlaze B2 because it's affordable and grants me peace-of-mind for scenarios where both disks fail. I don't use nearly the entire 4TB, so it's about $10/mo for my B2 usage.

So far in life, I've never had to use my cloud backups. Which is great, they'd be slow as can be to download. But the insurance of knowing they're there is completely worth it to me.

For many people here the finances of their tech are not a concern. It’s the source of our income so minor efficiencies can have a big impact on productivity and income. For me any reasonable expense that I will gain value from is worthwhile.

If you are a software engineer and you are concerned about $100/year in cost for your backup system, you might want to consider your priorities.

I guess... I make considerably more than that and my wife makes even more than I do (both of us are Software Engineers, no kids yet) and I have way more important and interesting shit to spend my money (and time) on than cloud provider backups. We also both grew up relatively poor, her from an immigrant family and myself from hillbillies in the Appalachians. Maybe that has something to do with it.

A lot of people who grow up poor have a hard time adjusting their spending habits to optimize their life when they become well off.

I've known such people who will go through great aggravation, follow on sunk costs no good reason, and waste a lot of time - just to save a few dollars or feel they didn't waste money.

I waste probably a few thousand dollars a year on expenditures I never utilize. If the dollar amount is below the cost of the aggravation, I generally won't bother.

If you're working as a software engineer, I assume you are making at least $100,000. A $100 annual cost to ensure your data is saved, and the time savings from maintaining a local backup, seems well worth it and it doesn't make sense to me for that cost to weigh into the decision.

How can you assume someone is making at least $100k if he is working as a software engineer? There's more to the world than the Bay Area.

At Italy maybe 30% of that is the average.

Even in the US this is not the average salary for software engineers if you look outside of the Bay Area and Seattle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com