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Comment by wobblyasp | Hacker News Reader

I just simply cannot think of a world where cloud based development takes off. I want control of my system, I want my code to run on my hardware, I want to be able to get into the nitty gritty and see what's going on.

Does anyone use these in a running production system? What was your experience like? My only previous experiences were being forced to use Salesforce's god awful tools

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We're already running our production code on other people's hardware, it's not like running development code is more important than that.

Oh for sure; I've just always felt like I've needed to have my code "nearby" to REPL it, or debug it. Maybe I've just not caught up with the times. We all know development sans internet is more or less impossible nowadays anyway.

Something about giving someone else control of my development environment just feels... wrong.

I only briefly tried out Cloud9, but I was impressed enough that I am probably going to make a bigger push to use it once I get back to doing some programming based side projects, which I slowed down on during the pandemic to focus on non-programming projects. Here are some of the positives that I saw.

I have an older Chromebook with a really nice screen that weighs about half as much as my other laptops. I spent quite a bit of time trying to get a local development environment setup, but there was always some issue that made it awkward. The local storage was too small, using an SD card was too slow, etc... I also tried using it as a dumb terminal by SSH'ing into a box, but I like having and IDE, and managing a box is fine but more work. Cloud9 provides an okay-ish IDE, but it also manages the EC2 instance, which is really nice.

Another benefit, is that I generally try to avoid working on side projects from my work computer. But I spend the vast majority of time on my work laptop, including casual web browsing. So if I am on my work laptop, and I come up with an idea, or want to test something out, I can just pop open a browser. I don't have to worry that I will accidentally leave files related to the side project on my work laptop, etc..

But just to be clear, I have no interest in using Cloud9 as a replacement for my day to day work. I agree with you, there are too many tools, environments, libraries, etc... that I use day to day that would be nearly impossible to replicate in a cloud environment.

I've been sorta keeping an eye on the space for a long time, because the dream for me would be to get the biggest iPad and have that be my full-time machine. Currently (well, pre-pandemic), my work laptop just moved from being docked on my desk at home to being docked on my desk at work. Sometimes I take it off the desk at home to watch Netflix or sit on the couch, but if you're doing anything memory-intensive, the battery dies pretty quickly. I'd much rather have the battery life and weight of an iPad, if I'm not losing too much functionality (obviously a huge caveat, and the reason why I haven't gone all-in on any of the cloud-based IDE options yet), and I'd also rather have most of my stuff in a cloud somewhere, so if I lose or break a computer, I don't lose all my stuff.

I hear you on the gut reaction! It just seems like if your application relies on a bunch of cloud services (S3, SQS, 3rd party APIs, etc) and will eventually be deployed to the cloud, is there any great value in saying that one little part is running on your laptop?

The only difference is whether it's run native UI or in a browser UI.

You'll have full REPLs, full filesystems, full plugin capability, etc. etc.

I can't imagine there will be much difference other than needing an internet connection.

Don't underestimate the insanity that is 'corporate network policy' in huge orgs. Giving a developer https access via chrome (already installed and allowed) to a system might take a few days/weeks. Getting 'vscode' plus libraries, tools, etc. installed on the local domain workstation might be literally impossible or take months. It's not optimal, sure, but it 'works'.

Check out VS Code remote support. Where the code is running doesn’t really matter and there are a lot of good reasons to be executing on a remote machine that’s more powerful, closer to build cache, etc.

These experiences just remote access to it. You still get a command prompt, you can still apt install, and it means the dev env can match prod (eg Debian) vs mismatches if you’re on OSX for example. Also allows the base machine config (tools, scripts, etc) to be curated and centralized.

Gitpod and GitHub Codespaces are great.

I actually think on machine development for non-mobile experiences will be uncommon in a couple years.

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