Do you use a VPS/cloud VM as a development machine? What is your setup?

Been doing this on and off. In my ideal world, I’d have a powerful remote computer that could be used for all kind of dev work including game development. And locally I would use iPad to remote in. But so far whenever I used remote machine, it is used primarily for webdev with WordPress or Laravel.

Usually, it is $5 Ubuntu VM from Linode. LAMP stack mostly. Switched to neovim from vim recently. Been trying to setup docker file to make it easy to replicate my vm but always seems run into issues.

And I use Blink shell on iPad to access it. Lack of hot reload and dev tools make it a little more challenging but not really too bad.

Not remote since I don't trust that a VPS provider will not look at my stuff. They have insight into every box, and run under a high powered hypervisor. You can always do FDE on the box, but since it's virtualized, they could still have insight.

So, it's local only VM for me, sandboxed away from other work. That way I can tear it down when the environment starts to get buggy (multiple versions of Python installed for example).

If you're wondering what kind of work I do, it's related to cryptocurrency and some projects require tight opsec. One small leak of sensitive data, and years of hard work and investment go out the window.