You Local Development Environment: Adapt to it or Change it to your liking?

Some programmers tend to stick with a development environment as go with it fully. Either customizing it for their liking or learning and adapting to the environment configuration. But is it better to adapt or customize the environment ?

What if you adapt ONLY to your local development environment ? 🔗

If you learn a certain local development environment, adapted yourself with it, stick with it, you’ll get stuck with it. What?

Yes. You will face an issue in production, or in another colleagues local dev. env., you will not know how to deal with it. And if the pieces and tools of your dev. env. changed or get updated, you’ll face the change with a huge grain of salt as you are used to the old version TOO MUCH.

So, is it better to customize the local dev. env. for your liking ?

What if you customized you local development environment ? 🔗

Customizing the local dev. env. is time-consuming. But, what if you decided to go with it?

You’ll be productive after a while, and your dev. env. will suit you better as it is set up for YOU by YOU.

But, and this is a big BUT, you’ll be more used to this CHOSEN and CUSTOMIZED dev. env. and when you face any forced changes or upgrades, you’ll likely be in a miserable moment.. or day.

The problem here is the same problem we faced earlier, it is face that you’ll get “used to” this dev. env. and you’ll struggle with different dev. env’s big time.

Is the solution is to use 2 or more local development environments ?

What if you adapt to 2 or more local development environment ? 🔗

Experiencing 2 or more local development environments is great for your challenging times. But this will consume your time more than you think. I find this weird idea satisfying and futureproof.

I use a container-based local environment; Docker to be specific, Laravel Sail (Docker-based) for Laravel projects, Docker itself for Go projects. I use this dev env usually on my macbook pro laptop.

And I use another native local development environment on my Ubuntu HP laptop.

And another development environment on the server itself. I use this dev env sometimes but I setup the production environment myself and make sure it is as bulletproof as I can.

The solution 🔗

The solution to this situation is not one dev. env. or another, not containerization, not remote development environments (RDEs). The solution is to use 2 development environments or more, and keep an open mind. That’s the ultimate solution because we all are in an everchaning industry.

Maybe the containerization is the future as we can just make the same production environment in Docker as the local development environment. So, it’s Docker with easier configuration and setup.

Or maybe the local development environments will be the thing of the past as RDEs will rise and get used by millions of developers. Cloudomation is arguing this path, and Google is creating a Cloud Development Environment (CDE) or Remote Development Environment (RDE) called Project IDX .

Do not get stuck with Vim, NeoVIM, PHPStorm, VSCode, Zed, Docker, .. etc! Use more than one of the same technology and keep an open mind.

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