Typical setup in the past is to boot into Ubuntu on a persistent usb drive. But i have been pleasantly surprised with my productivity using Google Cloud Shell.

Typical setup in the past is to boot into Ubuntu on a persistent usb drive. But i have been pleasantly surprised with my productivity using Google Cloud Shell. It basically consists of a performant terminal in Chrome. But combined with the Developers Console, it becomes a powerful environment for both building and deploying server side applications and long running tasks. I'd like to see more web based tools that allow for instant productivity when it comes to common scenarios: serving some static file assets, locking secrets in a vault, or calling third party APIs. There is much potential in this space ;)