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Hey Josh, thanks for the thoughts. You can use tools like Boxen, Puppet or Chef, but those tools are not useful for less experienced developers or designers wh

Hey Josh, thanks for the thoughts. You can use tools like Boxen, Puppet or Chef, but those tools are not useful for less experienced developers or designers who have to run the full stack just to touch the markup. Many developers prefer to write code instead of having to maintain scripts to build development environments. Similarly in production, many developers prefer a PaaS like Heroku or AppFog over dealing with VPSes or EC2. Another caveat of setting up development environments locally is that you have to repeat the setup procedure for every machine that you would like to develop on. Cloud environments make it easier to adhere to important application design patterns like treating backing services (like databases or caches) as attached resources. It also makes it easier to run the entire spectrum of your application on the same infrastructure, reducing dev / prod runtime issues in the continuous delivery process. The collaborative opportunities are also really exciting. Pair programming collaboration (we pair remotely pretty often), as well as sharing and cloning environments are made possible by hosting the environment on the cloud. We have some other great ideas in development currently that we think will significantly reduce the amount of time you spend setting up, managing, and using your environment, and the time you spend synchronizing your environment with teammates. With regards to your location question-- Our company is incorporated and headquartered in the US; our main office is in Menlo Park, although we do also roam around the city a lot. Happy to grab a beer with you sometime if you're in San Francisco! The majority of our infrastructure is on AWS, and while we do utilize their global availability zones, you can choose the regions where your box is provisioned. Happy to send you an invite, just email us at hello at action dot io Cheers AJ @ Action.IO

camus 14y ago
> but those tools are not useful for less experienced developers or designers who have to run the full stack just to touch the markup most of text editors and IDEs have some ftp/ssh capabilities , and most of them are free. If you call yourself a developers and you cant upload a file , you cant call yourself a developer. > Pair programming collaboration (we pair remotely pretty often), as well as sharing and cloning environments are made possible by hosting the environment on the cloud. You dont need yet another service for that. Each dev should have it's own environment to mess up with , ( i mean , lauching a server image on a VM is not that difficult , is it ? ) and thanks to CVS you can keep a simple infrastructure to share code. > Similarly in production, many developers prefer a PaaS like Heroku or AppFog over dealing with VPSes or EC2. PAAS can be good to start with. At some point ( as very fast ) , you end up with a VPS , because the service sucks and you pay less, really... why would you use Appfog if you cant even upload a big json file (JSON 500 error ... ) at the same time ? > Many developers prefer to write code instead of having to maintain scripts to build development environments I disagree 100% , it's part of the job , and there are loads of tools to facilitate deployment. Can a dev be that lazy ? show me a language or a framework that is hard to deploy in 2013 ? even rails is a breeze now. In essence you are kind of saying , the lazier they come the more they'll pay for that kind of service. it's a bet, good luck anyway.
- envex 14y ago
  > most of text editors and IDEs have some ftp/ssh capabilities , and most of them are free. If you call yourself a developers and you cant upload a file , you cant call yourself a developer. What does that have to do with local development?
javajosh 14y ago
I don't mean to be snarky, but you do understand that repeating the benefits of your product does not count as a response to concerns about it's drawbacks, right? (Although I do appreciate the factual clarification about the location of your HQ.)

camus 14y ago

> but those tools are not useful for less experienced developers or designers who have to run the full stack just to touch the markup most of text editors and IDEs have some ftp/ssh capabilities , and most of them are free. If you call yourself a developers and you cant upload a file , you cant call yourself a developer. > Pair programming collaboration (we pair remotely pretty often), as well as sharing and cloning environments are made possible by hosting the environment on the cloud. You dont need yet another service for that. Each dev should have it's own environment to mess up with , ( i mean , lauching a server image on a VM is not that difficult , is it ? ) and thanks to CVS you can keep a simple infrastructure to share code. > Similarly in production, many developers prefer a PaaS like Heroku or AppFog over dealing with VPSes or EC2. PAAS can be good to start with. At some point ( as very fast ) , you end up with a VPS , because the service sucks and you pay less, really... why would you use Appfog if you cant even upload a big json file (JSON 500 error ... ) at the same time ? > Many developers prefer to write code instead of having to maintain scripts to build development environments I disagree 100% , it's part of the job , and there are loads of tools to facilitate deployment. Can a dev be that lazy ? show me a language or a framework that is hard to deploy in 2013 ? even rails is a breeze now. In essence you are kind of saying , the lazier they come the more they'll pay for that kind of service. it's a bet, good luck anyway.

envex 14y ago
> most of text editors and IDEs have some ftp/ssh capabilities , and most of them are free. If you call yourself a developers and you cant upload a file , you cant call yourself a developer. What does that have to do with local development?

javajosh 14y ago

I don't mean to be snarky, but you do understand that repeating the benefits of your product does not count as a response to concerns about it's drawbacks, right? (Although I do appreciate the factual clarification about the location of your HQ.)