Ask HN: How do you feel about developer environments moving to the cloud?

No. No no no no no no no no no. No.

No no no no no no, no no no no no no no no no no. No no no no no no? No! No no no no no no no, no no no no. No no no no no, no no no no no no no no no no.

No no. No no no.

(borrowed from Caitlin Johnstone)

Developing across a local network with Windows RDP is pretty unpleasant over time, the latency and the low frame rate grate quite badly and its a lot worse over the internet for a box that is much further away. It sucks.

However if its a Linux shell and I am using a local VS Code and its compiling on the server as its backend and I can have local tools so I can use ssh file systems then it can actually be a very productive environment since the cloud can provide a lot of performance. One way I do this fairly often is with Go on ARM on a raspberry pi, the code wont run on Windows as the GPIO's aren't there and it can be quite productive, not as good as local but close enough.

But most companies are talking about the first model and its pretty horrible for real work.

Kinda shocks me that a large company, say Ford, would entrust their proprietary, core software to a cloud service. Microsoft, Amazon, or Google could decide on a whim they want to be in the car business (or any business) and would have access to the family jewels.

I don’t like it but having it as an option when working remotely from a place with bad internet is good.

I like to understand the whole picture of what I do, and the cloud usually hides tons of complexity for you. This would be all nice only if the complexity doesn’t end up exploiting in your face more often than not and your inability to fix it drives you crazy.

I don’t see what’s difficult about opening a code editor / IDE and cloning the source, and with containers, it’s easier to setup a local dev environment than it used to be.

It will make it harder to work while commuting. (Not that I commute these days, but maybe again in the future.)

Which has its pros and cons.

I have no strong feelings one way or the other.

Thin clients with a new veneer to it? Everything old is new again. Everything is in cycles.