i develop typically 3 types of things, backend rest services, web apps, and mobile apps. for me to truly rid myself of my macbook pro, i would need the followi

i develop typically 3 types of things, backend rest services, web apps, and mobile apps. for me to truly rid myself of my macbook pro, i would need the following, or equivalents: 1. the ability to start vm’s, preferably locally, i use these to run persistent services like redis, rabbitmq, databases, etc. i have this philosophy where my dev env needs to get as close as possible to the production env (at least from a software stack perspective) which means linux, yet it cant cost me as much as a production env. homebrew is great, but i try to stay away as much as possible because it’s a little different from my production env. accessing an ec2 instance or rds instance to access my postgres database is a bit overkill, i want things fast during development, ie local. sometimes i’m in places with no wifi or 4g coverage is spotty, this would be a nightmare. 2. i use visual code for all development, sometimes vi if i dont have a gui env, visual code is lightweight and pretty solid. i’m not 100% stuck on visual code, so if there’s some browser based derivative of it or wsywig for coding then i’m good. visual code is written in electron so nodejs, so i dont think it’s impossible. web development, html, js, css, this can all be done on an ipad relatively well, all the browsers i need to support are available. there’s typically no compilation that needs to happen, unless you’re using nodejs modules on your frontend. i seem to remember some company providing a cloud service that allows you to develop remotely, i think they were bought by github/msft or someone. kind of an interesting area. 3. backend dev, typically i use golang, this becomes a bigger problem, surely i could ssh somewhere and compile, or use some x11/vnc-like tool since i prefer a graphical ide, but that defeats the purpose of my 1000 usd ipad. it’s not really a dumb terminal or thin client per se, i have enough compute power, i want to leverage it. plus i’d need to be spending all this money on ec2 like instances. 4. xcode, this is another major issue, i’m stuck on xcode, sure i could use xamarin, but i dont think that runs on ios yet either. if this were resolved, i could strongly consider scraping my macbook pro. sounds kind of interesting if there could be a monthly service that could be purchased that provides you with remote dev envs without all the fuss of installing, managing any of it. e.g. i write code in a browser ide, it gets compiled in the cloud somewhere, deployed, and i can access it. i can connect different services to it, and testing is fully automated. i think i’d consider paying for something like this, but it’d have to be relatively cheap because otherwise i might as well do everything myself locally. i’m thinking 5 usd a month max. i havent used chromebook, but i think it’s closer to a dev env than ipad pro at the moment, i think you can even start containers and such on it.