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Comment by bduerst | Hacker News Reader

While this isn't a solution for many, I usually do development on a Linux VM for these exact reasons. Something not working? Boot a new VM from scratch, install necessary packages, and run it.

Usually faster than a couple days of internet searching.

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The developer's response to infrastructure as code. :) I use Vagrant for just about any development task these days, just because I can take all those arcane bits of knowledge, shove them into an ansible playbook (or whatever provisioning tool you like), and hopefully never have to fuck around with them again.

Shave the yak once.

Write a script that shaves the yak for you next time.

Even with Vagrant, don't you want to run your own native IDE? And if you're doing that, the IDE probably wants to look at your dependencies to figure out what your code is doing. Which means you need to set up the whole thing locally anyways. At which point it appears you've defeated the purpose of setting everything up inside Vagrant.

You can generally solve this by just sharing folders between the host & the vagrant box for the code and the dependencies - point your IDE at those.

That involves compromises on battery life. Why not just run Linux instead?

This involves compromises on battery life.

Well played :)

I do all of my development on a 2015 Macbook Air and run a Linux virtual machine almost every day. Still plenty of battery to get me through more than a full day of work and casual browsing.

Way better than Linux on the desktop. Way easier than configuring a second operating system to run the stack. I'm not going to production on MacOS, why would I develop on it?

Given the tendency to use containers these days for various reasons, there's presumably an argument that you could just make that the expected practice. It's still more principled than just downloading and running a single binary unikernel in the container, though exactly what you would gain is a mystery to me (Gentoo points?)

I've gotten to the point where I scoff at projects that expect me to install hours of crap and dependencies at specific versions and can't bother to encode it as a Dockerfile. Like, come on, you had to figure out how to get this installed, eventually you're going to have to do it again, why not document it with code (Dockerfile) and never do it again?

Ironically, just watched someone whine about open source projects using Docker for dev on the 19th and then praising Docker for basically the same thing on the 22nd. Docker isn't magic and no one says it is and people yelling against that strawman are just making themselves look ignorant.

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