I still develop with localhost, but instead of running my Rails apps on my Arch machine’s ruby install, using Arch’s postgres, etc. I run everything in docker containers based on the same version of Debian as production. This catches almost all deployment issues ahead of time, and the rest are caught in the staging environment.
One of my favourite reasons for developing on localhost is when I'm curled up in a coffee shop deliberately ignoring the internet so I can finish a specific task. When I do this I don't want to be online, online is full of distractions and context switches. Nobody can message me, nowt can pop up, I can just stay in my hyper focus until this cup of coffee is done and I need refuelling (or to look something up).
> To paraphrase Bob Metcalfe, if the browser reduced operating systems to “a poorly debugged set of device drivers”, then the cloud is reducing the dev machine to a poorly debugged set of environment mocks.
A certain breed of application developers love to spout this tripe until the operating system and/or the dev machine and/or the Internet connection don't work. Then queue days of tearful agony and whining to the tune of "I need this to do my job!"
While I understand the reasons why the author think it will go that way, I'm not fully convinced:
- [in average rich countries in 2030] Fast gigabit internet is cheap and everywhere (5G or mesh wifi) => Glad to hear that it will be that way, unlike the 4G for which we got the same promises yet for which I often have issues with my phone in the suburbs of a middle-sized city of a rich country. Also glad to hear ISP issues will be a thing of the past. Sorry for the slight sarcasm here, but this point is a prerequisite for the whole post.
- Outside of work for which expenses are not mine to pay, I'm really not a fan of paying extra for cloud services when I can do without.
- On the "editing code" part => That seem to introduce quite a lot of friction. What if the tool I like to use are not supported as part of this workflow? Which of those support private clouds if I'm working on things that must be kept private?
Last but not least, though this one is more a nitpick of mine than a real complain, but the article uses "localhost" quite ambiguously as sometime it refers to "running things locally" and other as a concept of the whole development machine (editing things locally, having the code on your drive...) and talk about things like OS development: While this may work fine for webdevs, I'm not so sure about other kinds of developers. GUI dev would get added friction, same for work needing low latency (the article talks about edge computing, but that requires paying even more if your structure is small). Maybe that works for Tesla OS devs, but not all companies have what is needed to create a full-fledged cloud environment for embedded developers.
I mean an occasional part of my job involves UI animations. I'm not debugging that over the cloud. To these type of people I'm sure the response is "Well actually all websites should be plain text"
It's never absolute in either direction, and I don't understand the persistent desire to frame it as such. Local dev on some level will always be a fallback, or in hardware dev cases a priority, because local devices will always exist. Cloud dev will always be a priority because cloud-based services are what most end users rely on now, on some level, whether they know it or not.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 19.4 ms ] threadA certain breed of application developers love to spout this tripe until the operating system and/or the dev machine and/or the Internet connection don't work. Then queue days of tearful agony and whining to the tune of "I need this to do my job!"
- [in average rich countries in 2030] Fast gigabit internet is cheap and everywhere (5G or mesh wifi) => Glad to hear that it will be that way, unlike the 4G for which we got the same promises yet for which I often have issues with my phone in the suburbs of a middle-sized city of a rich country. Also glad to hear ISP issues will be a thing of the past. Sorry for the slight sarcasm here, but this point is a prerequisite for the whole post.
- Outside of work for which expenses are not mine to pay, I'm really not a fan of paying extra for cloud services when I can do without.
- On the "editing code" part => That seem to introduce quite a lot of friction. What if the tool I like to use are not supported as part of this workflow? Which of those support private clouds if I'm working on things that must be kept private?
Last but not least, though this one is more a nitpick of mine than a real complain, but the article uses "localhost" quite ambiguously as sometime it refers to "running things locally" and other as a concept of the whole development machine (editing things locally, having the code on your drive...) and talk about things like OS development: While this may work fine for webdevs, I'm not so sure about other kinds of developers. GUI dev would get added friction, same for work needing low latency (the article talks about edge computing, but that requires paying even more if your structure is small). Maybe that works for Tesla OS devs, but not all companies have what is needed to create a full-fledged cloud environment for embedded developers.
It's still by far the fastest way to prototype for me and it works out of the box.