Comment by lizknope | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lizknope | Hacker News Reader

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Are most companies this flexible in allowing developers to install whatever they want?

> My physical machine is a 2023 MacBook Pro with M2 Pro CPU

> I’m using VMWare Fusion Pro

> Quite often I’ve found developers frowning up Ubuntu and preaching for folks to use NixOS, Arch, Debian or other distros. The reality for me was Ubuntu was the fastest way to get set up and now

I'm in integrated circuit / semiconductor design. At every big company over the last 30 years we are given a computer and we can change the desktop environment but we aren't installing our own operating system.

The people I know in software have a common OS, compiler, and build environment. They aren't dictating what text editor you use but you aren't working on projects individually but together.

So if everyone at the author's company is doing their own thing do they have problems integrating all the code together? "Oh you used version 2.3.4 but I used version 2.4.7 which fixed this issue, what are we using to ship with?" Or is this not a problem?

I work mostly in web / server side development, it's not really a problem I've had for a number of years now. Some of my colleagues use various linux distros, others macos. No one is using Windows that I know of.

Each project we have requires a specific tool chain version (python, elixir, ...) and specific versions of things like postgres. All dependencies are listed with some kind dependency definition file (pyproject.toml, package.json, mix.exs). If you bump a package it's done in the definition file as part of your changes and goes through CI for packaging and releasing. The rest of the team will get the new package version as soon as they pull your changes and run `just deps` or whatever. CI is the ultimate determining factor of whether your code actually "works".

We also package and deploy with containers, but this isn't the real determining factor for any of the above.

That sounds great. I probably haven't asked my software friends about their setups in 5-10 years.

There's typically a list of dependencies of a specific project as a part of it, (hopefully) handled automatically by some part of build pipeline.

Build pipelines don't have much to do with actual development. What, do you edit stuff but never build it locally?

I should have written "build process" instead I suppose.

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