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A $5 DigitalOcean droplet/VPS. There's so much packed in there. A public, static IP and just enough RAM and disk to do anything you could possibly want to. And

A $5 DigitalOcean droplet/VPS. There's so much packed in there. A public, static IP and just enough RAM and disk to do anything you could possibly want to. And the relatively low RAM and disk limits does make you think about memory and disk consumption in a way that you're seldom otherwise incentivized to think about it while you're in undergrad. It's also a gateway to developing working proficiency with linux, which is absolutely a huge multiplier for any software engineer. Just knowing how to grep, sed and 'awk {print $1}' gets you so amazingly far. And on a higher level, knowing how to throw together an nginx proxy or simple postgres db etc is also huge.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
My habit, when I'm playing with a new language, or other command-line-friendly gadget, is to spin up a new GNU/Linux VM on a cloud somewhere, dabble on there, then delete the VM once I'm done. If I've got any files worth keeping I put them on GitHub. Don't have to worry about filling my own machine with rubbish, I can load the VM without it impacting my own machine, and I can generally be fearless (and incautious) in the knowledge the machine is of no real consequence. It's also a good way to try out an unfamiliar distro, or an unfamiliar Unix. > It's also a gateway to developing working proficiency with linux And also with cloud computing. It's a good excuse to play about with EC2 firewalls, for instance.
andrewmcwatters 6y ago
LowEndBox, and you can get $15/year VPSs out there.
- jldugger 6y ago
  free-for-dev lists a couple of free forever hosts -- OCI and GCP.
  - andrewmcwatters 6y ago
    Thanks for sharing! I've never heard of free-for.dev.
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
A raspberry pi 4 would be better bang for your buck in my opinion, especially if your IP is relatively static through your ISP. There's benefits to having compute on the same network as you. It will also be much faster to transfer files.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

My habit, when I'm playing with a new language, or other command-line-friendly gadget, is to spin up a new GNU/Linux VM on a cloud somewhere, dabble on there, then delete the VM once I'm done. If I've got any files worth keeping I put them on GitHub. Don't have to worry about filling my own machine with rubbish, I can load the VM without it impacting my own machine, and I can generally be fearless (and incautious) in the knowledge the machine is of no real consequence. It's also a good way to try out an unfamiliar distro, or an unfamiliar Unix. > It's also a gateway to developing working proficiency with linux And also with cloud computing. It's a good excuse to play about with EC2 firewalls, for instance.

andrewmcwatters 6y ago

LowEndBox, and you can get $15/year VPSs out there.

jldugger 6y ago
free-for-dev lists a couple of free forever hosts -- OCI and GCP.
- andrewmcwatters 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing! I've never heard of free-for.dev.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

A raspberry pi 4 would be better bang for your buck in my opinion, especially if your IP is relatively static through your ISP. There's benefits to having compute on the same network as you. It will also be much faster to transfer files.