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First of all, kudos to this guy. He's happy with his set-up. It works for him and it works for a lot of other people. That said, I feel the need to warn others
by AngryParsley 14y ago
First of all, kudos to this guy. He's happy with his set-up. It works for him and it works for a lot of other people.
That said, I feel the need to warn others who are considering switching to a cloud-based development environment. There are some significant disadvantages to doing development on a remote machine. The biggest issue is that you are dependent on Internet connectivity. If your connection is down, you are dead in the water. If it's slow, you'll get frustrated. Connectivity is only going to get better, but the occasions when you're offline can be very memorable. Additionally, your choice of editors is rather limited. Whatever you use, it has to be terminal-based. A GUI editor like Xcode, Sublime Text 2, or Coda is right-out.
Now let's take a look at the advantages. Cost is mentioned. An iPad is $500-800. A cloud server is $20/month. A maxxed-out 11" MacBook Air is just under $1800. If you throw it away after 2 years (instead of selling it), that's $75/month. In the same time, you'd spend $40-55/month for the iPad/cloud combo. Assuming normal bay area wages, the cost difference isn't worth caring about.
The iPad/cloud setup has one big advantage: battery life. An iPad will last 10 hours. Most laptops can barely do half that. But that's pretty much its only advantage. The laptop beats it in performance, capabilities (you can run VMs and test other OSes/browsers), ergonomics, and expandability. Laptops can also output to larger monitors.
After considering all these things, the best solution is whatever you're most productive using. If you find yourself away from power often, the iPad is your best bet. If you often have slow/nonexistent Internet connectivity or you like to plug into external displays, go with a laptop.
My most productive times are when I'm offline, so my weapon of choice is the 11" MacBook Air. I load it up with the right documentation and virtual machines beforehand. Then I spend the next 5-7 hours writing prodigious amounts of code. At that point both myself and the Air's battery are spent.
Again, I don't mean to imply that the author is mistaken. I simply want to manage expectations for anyone considering following him.
- kleiba 14y agoCost is mentioned. An iPad is $500-800. A cloud server is $20/month. A maxxed-out 11" MacBook Air is just under $1800. If you throw it away after 2 years (instead of selling it), that's $75/month. In the same time, you'd spend $40-55/month for the iPad/cloud combo. Not sure I can follow your calculation. If the iPad is (at most) $800 and the MacBook Air is ~$1800, you'll save roughly $1000 if you go with the iPad. If a cloud server is $20/month than it takes you about 4 years to spend these $1000. Thus if you compare the values within a time span of 2 years, shouldn't the iPad+server combo safe you roughly $500?! I'm sure I'm missing something.
- chacha102 14y agoYes. That's what he said. $75(/month) - $55(/month) = $20 * 24 (months) = $480 saved over 2 years. And it is his argument is that over a 2 year span, that is negligible savings in the tech industry. Especially considering most people spend $2400 in that same span on their iPhone. ($200+$90*24=$2360)
- aes256 14y agoThen after 2 years, sell the $1,800 MacBook Air for ~$1,000, the iPad (now presumably 2-3 generations out of date) for ~$300, and the Mac becomes better value. You've taken a $800 depreciation hit on the Mac, and although the depreciation on the iPad was only ~$400, you've also spent $480 on your VPS...
- aes256 14y agoOnce you factor hardware depreciation in (who would toss a laptop after 2 years when you could sell it for 60% residual and put the money towards a new one?) there's inevitably going to come a point where the Mac has a lower TCO. Lower upfront costs do not necessarily translate into savings further down the line, especially when your choice of hardware ties you into a $20/month ongoing expense.
- WillP 14y agoYou can actually still use a GUI editor with cloud-based development. The majority of my code is stored on a Linode server. I use SSHFS to mount my working folder and edit in whatever editor I like (typically Geany). Connectivity is still an issue, but can be mitigated by tweaking the cache timeout.
- cmwelsh 14y agoI've had issues with sshfs not sending the proper signals when files are deleted or renamed. It can make it quite frustrating when relying on tools that watch the filesystem for changes (like precompilers or editor tree views).
- antihero 14y agoCould those tools not be run remotely?
- lallysingh 14y agoSome editors support editing remote files. Emacs and TRAMP (<http://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/#Overview> http://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/#Overview>) does this perfectly well. BBEdit 10 also does it (<http://www.andre-aulich.de/en/perm/edit-remote-files-using-your-local-bbedit-app-and-a-secure-ssh-connection> http://www.andre-aulich.de/en/perm/edit-remote-files-using-y...). That editor is completely underrated.
- Freaky 14y agoVim supports remote editing too, with netrw: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/pi_netrw.html http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/pi_netrw.html
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- venatiodecorus 14y ago"Additionally, your choice of editors is rather limited. Whatever you use, it has to be terminal-based. A GUI editor like Xcode, Sublime Text 2, or Coda is right-out." I just want to point out that with a program like WinSCP, you can sync a folder over SSH and essentially work over SSH with whatever editor you'd like.
- guelo 14y agoWe're talking about an iPad.
- DigitalJack 14y agoThat doesn't really help you if you are on an ipad.
- sliverstorm 14y agoHopefully it is clear from the article itself how important being happy and comfortable at a terminal is. He spends two of his four pages discussing his Vim and screen configuration.
- andmarios 14y agoFor Android at least, there is a development suite called Terminal IDE (can be installed from play, no root required), that among other tools, it provides you with vim, git and ssh. So you can do all your development on your tablet even when offline and upload your work to your server with git when you get back online.
- dysoco 14y agoLooks amazing: but it takes about 100MB of storage, and you can't install it to the SD... come on, I only have about 200MB of internal storage, and about 20MB aviable.