Ask HN: How are you building work from home dev environments? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How are you building work from home dev environments?

10 pointspsxuaw9 comments

As a developer, how are you working remotely?

This is a new scenario for lots of people, and I think people are struggling to create good development environments using their home computers.

Started accessing office network via VPN and using my work machine with VNC. But, latency is a bit high for typing and its not productive.

Next, tried using Visual Studio Code in my home machine, and Remote SSH Extension for loading source code and development tools (linting, compilers, interpreters, etc) on my work machine. This made things a bit easier, but latency for saving files and waiting for VSCode Git Extension scan changes is a bit high, bothering me.

Made a separate Firefox profile too, syncing with my work machine, and it's great.

I am not keen of copying company source code on my home computer, and starting mixing personal and work files. I like to compartmentalize things.

How do you do?

Separate VM? Separate Linux user? systemd nspawn container? Separate OS installation? Separate computer? How do you avoid mixing things and making a mess?

PS - Don't have company issued laptop - very small company PS - Running exclusively on Linux PS - Databases (production/development) and data stays at company network

I'm doing remote work for decades, so nothing changed but the lunch menu. Now I have to cook by myself. I always worked via laptop, and only for massive tests need to use the big machines. Most of them locally, as being independent is far superior. Most stuff is open source, do I can use public CI's and trackers.

Working remotely is also far more productive as there are zero interruptions to your workflow. I would say twice as much. Unfortunately you'll also do more hours, because it's so much more productive, so beware to stop. Time to think and reflect is important, and you might forget that. Turn off slack, irc and similar notifications. Check email only twice a day, it's a huge timesink.

Tooling for me is fine as I'm a simple web dev and often worked from home anyway.

The downside is my wife is struggling to work from home too...and the kids are all home.

I get up at 4 or 5 am just to get some uninterrupted / quiet time...

Most of the projects uses docker, which i use to develop my own projects anyway, so, i dont need to install different dependencies or make my own pc as anything else. I just use it as regular.

systemd nspawn containers. but you have choices. lxc/d, nspawn, docker... I've also used qemu with virsh but haven't recently had the time to set this up in my current abode. my needs are likely different than yours. I'm a security engineer/developer so I'm building a lot of tools in house ... deployment and distribution isn't as much of a concern. I don't really deal with SQL backends in the same way you might. So I can get away with building a local db or feed data into an ELK stack over VPN + SSH. I'm using openvpn btw. Currently work for a regional health services provider and generally deal with a lot of different environments. As you can imagine right now is hectic and being able to to handle dependencies for all the different tools and libraries helps stay ahead of the curveballs. Having containers and virtual environments (venv) mostly planned out keeps me from throwing my workstation out the window as well.

Now is the time to awaken your inner DevOps guru.

I’ve been using Remote Desktop. I don’t notice the latency I’d guess it’s under 20ms. If I had to use local pc it would be a big hassle setting it all up again. Years ago I worked somewhere where the network was VPN and you bring the laptop home to work, that worked very nicely.

Shouldn't your employer provide you with a device or the means to work from home? Despite the ongoing crisis, your employer can't possibly force you to use your own devices. What if you had no personal laptop or desktop workstation?

As a dev and company owner, i would say its optional. Ive always like to use my own devices, most of the time. Sometimes i receive some money because of that, but it was just a bonus. I did because i wanted to.

The day before we got the offical WFH order, I dragged my workstation and setup home and plonked it on the dining room table.

In normal times i have a laptop at home and connect to my workstation with a VPN, mosh+tmux and/or local emacs + TRAMP.

Docker solved most of my problems but I used to simply have another user account on my home machine so my personal stuff doesn't mix with work. Makes it harder to get distracted by personal things, too.

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