Ask HN: What's your company's dev environment like?

6 points·rpug··5 comments

We're trying to provide the best dev environment possible to allow our developers to be most productive.

A developer's lone MacBook Pro can only go so far, so we want to supplement it with extra resources.

We're a Java and Tomcat shop.

Looking to see what other people are doing.. we're too big for the Amazon cloud. Should we give everyone their own developer workstation, or virtualize.. or... ???

Thanks

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First, one of the best things you can do is let each developer choose their machines and give them a generous budget. Not only will that likely lead to the most productivity but it also puts the employee control as well as discourages complaints.

I don't have Java/Tomcat experience but have yet to run into a situation where a MacBook Pro was an inadequate development machine. I also don't understand "we're too big for Amazon".

Whatever they'll do their best work on! Our organization doesn't provide computers (its not really a company, its a semi-non-profit entity and all the employees are contractors), but we use Mac, Windows, and Linux and a variety of environments within. Especially if you're a Java shop, OS doesn't really matter.

What did the developers IN your environment say?

The developers want something that works.. and is fast. No waiting for builds!

Are the machines the fastest you can afford?

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