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Comment by anyonecancode | Hacker News Reader

I feel I'm swimming against the current of contemporary dev practices, but I actually believe trying to run as much of your apps and development locally is important. Not exclusively, but at least from time to time I think shutting off your network connection and seeing what happens is important. It flushes out all sorts of assumptions, especially around dependencies, you may not have realized you had. If you at least occasionally code in a local, non-networked environment, I think you end up with more robust code.

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My job now has no ability to run our code locally and its terrible. I work on APIs which at the end of the day is an HTTP server making and responding to requests. When I make a change its impossible to test locally which is terrible.

The same issue applies to serverless technologies (at least last when I used them). It was extremely difficult to run serverless services locally, debug issues etc.

Having the cloud is great, but nothing will beat being able to run things locally.

It just gives you so much more control. You're not locked into a specific editor or tool chain, you can integrate with whatever other local tools might be specific to you, etc

This is a great feature, something to complement existing development approaches, but I'm always going to prefer my own setup where I have everything configured exactly how I like it.

I can strongly second this. I currently work on a serverless project and running/debugging code locally is one of the biggest pain points. Over time I've gotten better at mocking out a bunch of stuff to try and get the code I care about running, but it's a really rough process.

There are of course risks that the local setup process will differ from the prod environment in a serious way. Even with good automated test coverage I feel less confident about the code I commit here than most other places I've worked.

I've used serverless and AWS chalice to build Lambda, and both have have the option to dev locally. That would be a nightmare to have to wait to deploy every time.

I would love it if you could expand on this. I currently work with AWS Lambdas a lot and have tried a couple options for running them locally but never got to a point where it was worth the effort. For example I use PyCharm and tried getting the aws serverless plugin working with it for running Lambdas and State Machines but just kept running into different problems.

There must be a better approach than setting up a bunch of mocks and running the core logic in a scratch file.

> It just gives you so much more control. You're not locked into a specific editor or tool chain, you can integrate with whatever other local tools might be specific to you, etc

My experience aligns very strongly with this. A local stack lets you add debug/print statements anywhere. There is no "magic", you can see the thing run on your machine. The freedom is unmatched.

Agreed, but for most companies, you're not going to be able to run the whole stack locally.

I think the main use case for this style of development is web apps.

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