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Comment by intrasight | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: what does "local" even mean today? I think it means different things to different organizations. Most of my work involves using a local VM to RDP to a remove VM where I edit code that then runs on a dev VM.

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To me, local means on my machine which I can take offline and still get useful work done.

That makes sense. I've not had that in at least a decade.

I've never not had this since 1997. Many different companies, domains, tech stacks. Even in an embedded system we had emulators we could run on our own machine.

I'm not saying that it's not possible nor desirable, and most vendors support local dev via emulators. I'm saying that I don't bother with that anymore.

To me, the files are in the filesystem of the OS on my computer. I can edit, build, and debug with a toolchain that is running on my computer.

I may or may not have dependencies in a development environment that I call over the network, but the thing I’m looking to change is running on my machine.

Yeah, your scenario is fairly common unfortunately. When your code has to access a database or system inside the firewall, and the security folks don't want developer's local machines to access anything inside the firewall. So they end up setting up these personal "local/development" VMs inside the firewall for development work, and these are not to be confused with the development server.

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