Ask HN: Have you ever tried two PC development? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Have you ever tried two PC development?

8 pointsandrewfromx4 comments

I kinda stumbled into this but wondering if others make a practice of this. I have a macbook, and I have a fedora31 linux machine. Not a VM or something in the cloud, two real physical laptops and I use the mac for 4 hours a day and the linux machine for 4 hours a day.

And I've noticed this forces good dev PC hygiene in that I have this rule I never break: no files I need can only be on one hard drive. Also, if I have sample data in one database, I force myself to have an easy way to re-create that sample data for myself 4 hour later. But it's not just for myself. This two PC dev system means when the next developer comes on the project there are no surprises of stuff that only works on my 1 machine that did the dev work.

And the fear of what if my laptop is stolen goes toward zero since 4 hours later I always start all over on a different laptop.

Oh and I get to be BOTH a mac user and a linux user! My copy paste skills are amazing.

I’ve developed on two computers for about 6 years - an iMac at my office and MacBook Air for home and travel. All my projects are in a Dropbox folder but I also use Git. It works really well.

The biggest issues are when Dropbox detects conflicts and spits out conflict files. I wish I could turn that off. Checking out a different branch can be noisy because Dropbox will sync all the “changes” files.

The only major problem I’ve had is Dropbox bogs down with 500k+ files - even if they are very small. NPM will put you there fast.

Years ago I worked for a firm producing a patient invoice database system for hospitals. The system was sold for either Xenix based computers (default) or for DOS based computers. The software was written in Quick BASIC (yes!) and the 2 OS forms were synced via Xenix's Revision Control System. We had a in-house executable which compared the R.C.S version information recorded in the source code on both machines.

I tried and didn't like it. Very often I ended with partial uncommitted work in one machine, so I was forced to stay on it until I could commit stuff. It's much easier to have a running tmux session somewhere that you can ssh to from anywhere.

i guess I live for how quickly i can git commit; git push. I never want to leave more than few hours of work on 1 hard drive because of 1) what if that drive fails 2) what if I delete by mistake 3) no other devs can see what i'm doing

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