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Warren Shea

A local dev environment

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011 at 1:59 pm

I hate deving locally….and I know I’m in the minority of developers who feel this way.

As I write my list of pros and cons….I figure I’ll just make a pro/con chart. Like in Gilmore Girls. (ahh, I didn’t just write that…).

PRO/CON list of developing on the server directly

PRO

  • I just like the idea of making a change and having it directly affect production. Once you make the change, and you’re happy – you’re done.
  • I guess this should go with the point above, but I don’t like “releasing” or “promotion” of files. There’s always the strange chance something might work in dev, but not production because of different server settings, or someone forgot to document that something should be promoted (like a DB table, or certain files).
  • Hard Drives fail….and it would suck to lose all your work. When your information is stored on a server, the chance of failure is not only less likely, but you’re technically paying them for their services you don’t see (like backups)
CON

  • As I experienced recently, network issues (your ISP or their environment) can prevent you from doing work
  • Obviously the “make the change directly in production” idea doesn’t work for large or high traffic sites.
  • When I want to run old .asp files from my past, I’d have to upload them to the server, rather that just try files locally….such a pain!

Now, I GET that DEVing on the server directly isn’t used in any professional environment. But for sites like worldofwarren.com or warrenshea.com, that get so little traffic, and the users/readers are people I know IRL (generally), I don’t really care if stuff is down or broken or whatever.

Anyways…………all that said. I still like deving on a server directly.

But with my extra storage space on c:\ , I’ll throw all those local deving things I need. IIS7.0, XAMP thing…maybe create some Linux VM or something….just to do it. I was running at 89GB/100GB used. 11G is still a lot but I had to delete certain games and stuff to make room…and delete certain programs (Adobe Premiere Q_Q)….but with my new setup, my c:\ is now 89/200GB used. Plenty of room for stuff :D

I’ll give local development a try…it’s especially more important for an ASP.NET application.

Don’t get me wrong, I do local development all the time at work….I know how it works. Just for personal stuff, I find it more of a nuisance than a benefit.

2 Responses to “A local dev environment”

  1. ElGranto says:

    So this is why all your sites are always broken?

  2. Karol says:

    I thought we already discussed how a local environment is better. -.-

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