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Comment by bitbender | Hacker News Reader

> I think my next setup will be using my (company-issued) macbook as a thin client against a beefy unix machine. That way I'd keep a number of affordances (trackpad, iTerm, fancy Emacs etc) while having my core tooling absolutely stable.

You mind going into a little detail on how you’ll go about this?

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So I'd have th unix box and macbook both at home, networked locally.

In the macbook I'd try hard to have no npm/rubygems/maven/... because these are all a security risk.

The unix box would be heavily firewalled so that no bad code could not talk home or reach my macbook.

Communication would happen primarily via ssh (e.g. macos iTerm -> unix box), but also as a NFS share so that I can edit files from my IDE flawlessly (I use Emacs which has a thing called Tramp which makes this unnecessary, but I'm hesitant about its effectiveness).

So, in my macbook I'd have a small number of trusted tools like iTerm and Emacs while everything else, like Ruby/node.js/Java/postgresql processes would happen in the unix box. My workflow would be typically:

- edit files to the NFS share;

- issue commands to the unix box via ssh (an IDE can abstract this away); and

- have some port forwarding for accessing e.g. the webapp I'm working on from macOS chrome.

In the end it would be a pretty vanilla approach and not tremendously different from using a virtual machine via Vagrant. The difference would be that the macOS machine would be thinner, and that the unix box would have greater focus on security and stability.

And of course performance - with a real box I don't have to worry about Vagrant/Docker/... making my macbook overheat.

Not OP, but I've dabbled doing just that with a Digital Ocean droplet and using VS Code's Remote SSH extension. It's not lag free, but it's nice being able to access the same dev environment from multiple computers.

Good luck getting this new feature worked out while on a long flight. Remote dev setups are nice, until internet is not being nice to you (either non-existent or wobbly)

Ignoring the last year, how often do you need to code while flying. I can't even use a laptop in a seat unless I pay extra for the extra leg room seats.

As someone who used to live on another continent as where my employers office was, I coded while flying at least 6 times a year, sometimes even more.

And while most would not fly that often, being able to code when internet is not available or in a bad shape is not only a 'nice to have' option, but almost a 'must have'

Thanks for sharing!

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