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I don't understand the basic premise that a development environment takes hours to setup. You must have production deployment automated, and you should have pre

I don't understand the basic premise that a development environment takes hours to setup. You must have production deployment automated, and you should have pre-production and testing environment deployments automated too. If so, building a dev install is minutes, not hours; never ever a day of work.

callumjones 12y ago
This depends on both the development environment you're setting up and the skill level. If you're not familiar with the OS' terminal, dependencies or installers then those are just additional barriers to getting down to programming. With a prepared development environment for say Rails or Meteor you can get started very quickly learning to develop with these frameworks. For some development environments it was previously a pain on Windows, while this has changed for Meteor it's still not as friendly for Rails. If you can offload those problems to a hosted environment that's a big win.
deleted 12y ago
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jszymborski 12y ago
On Windows, setting up a dev environment can often be a pain in the ass, so if you're locked in for wtv reason I can see the pain point they're trying to alleviate. Even then though, with things like chocolatey nuget[1] and cmdr [2], windows is heading towards parity. [1] https://chocolatey.org/ https://chocolatey.org/ [2] http://gooseberrycreative.com/cmder/ http://gooseberrycreative.com/cmder/
- ripberge 12y ago
  Visual Studio Monaco is really the competitor to a product like this. It's a browser based version of Visual Studio that can be tied into other cloud services.
- jzelinskie 12y ago
  cmdr looks cool, but how does it compare to using cygwin through mintty? Next time I reinstall Windows, I think I'll try out chocolatey to see if I can get the `brew cask` experience out of Windows.
  - vdaniuk 12y ago
    cmder was my gateway drug to moving from windows to linux and from gui to ~50% cli use. Cygwin didn't produce quite the same effect. Also, cmder is gorgeous :)
general_failure 12y ago
Yeah, I don't get this either. We work on fairly complex stuff and yet it takes maybe only a hour to set it all up.
ajhit406 12y ago
There are a ton of additional benefits of being in the cloud. You can backup your environment and replicate it in minutes, you can collaborate with other developers across the world really easily in real-time, and you can work from any device with a modern web browser. A lot of clients really prefer using Nitrous environments for their service providers because they feel as though they have more control over the developers they're hiring and their IP -- clearly there are still risks since there are fairly easy ways to pull code down but "owning" the machine that your contractors are working on is a step in the right direction for compliance and audit purposes. We’ve found the biggest benefits are really around the collaborative use cases — sharing environments easily and working together remotely. It’s saved us a ton of time when we’re troubleshooting issues. Yes, you can use tmux over SSH, but not everyone wants to setup and maintain their own development server. I think that interacting with your environment using Nitrous Pro is a really enjoyable experience. That said, we’ve still got a lot of work to do, so we really do appreciate all the feedback and support from the HN crowd.
- sergiosgc 12y ago
  > We’ve found the biggest benefits are really around the collaborative use cases That's an acceptable selling point. Pull it to the front and center on the site. Do not just mention that it's better for collaboration, demonstrate it. Right now, copy on the site is centered on ease of setup which, to me, is a poor feature to justify ceding control of dev workstations.

callumjones 12y ago

This depends on both the development environment you're setting up and the skill level. If you're not familiar with the OS' terminal, dependencies or installers then those are just additional barriers to getting down to programming. With a prepared development environment for say Rails or Meteor you can get started very quickly learning to develop with these frameworks. For some development environments it was previously a pain on Windows, while this has changed for Meteor it's still not as friendly for Rails. If you can offload those problems to a hosted environment that's a big win.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

jszymborski 12y ago

On Windows, setting up a dev environment can often be a pain in the ass, so if you're locked in for wtv reason I can see the pain point they're trying to alleviate. Even then though, with things like chocolatey nuget[1] and cmdr [2], windows is heading towards parity. [1] https://chocolatey.org/ https://chocolatey.org/ [2] http://gooseberrycreative.com/cmder/ http://gooseberrycreative.com/cmder/

ripberge 12y ago
Visual Studio Monaco is really the competitor to a product like this. It's a browser based version of Visual Studio that can be tied into other cloud services.
jzelinskie 12y ago
cmdr looks cool, but how does it compare to using cygwin through mintty? Next time I reinstall Windows, I think I'll try out chocolatey to see if I can get the `brew cask` experience out of Windows.
- vdaniuk 12y ago
  cmder was my gateway drug to moving from windows to linux and from gui to ~50% cli use. Cygwin didn't produce quite the same effect. Also, cmder is gorgeous :)

general_failure 12y ago

Yeah, I don't get this either. We work on fairly complex stuff and yet it takes maybe only a hour to set it all up.

ajhit406 12y ago

There are a ton of additional benefits of being in the cloud. You can backup your environment and replicate it in minutes, you can collaborate with other developers across the world really easily in real-time, and you can work from any device with a modern web browser. A lot of clients really prefer using Nitrous environments for their service providers because they feel as though they have more control over the developers they're hiring and their IP -- clearly there are still risks since there are fairly easy ways to pull code down but "owning" the machine that your contractors are working on is a step in the right direction for compliance and audit purposes. We’ve found the biggest benefits are really around the collaborative use cases — sharing environments easily and working together remotely. It’s saved us a ton of time when we’re troubleshooting issues. Yes, you can use tmux over SSH, but not everyone wants to setup and maintain their own development server. I think that interacting with your environment using Nitrous Pro is a really enjoyable experience. That said, we’ve still got a lot of work to do, so we really do appreciate all the feedback and support from the HN crowd.

sergiosgc 12y ago
> We’ve found the biggest benefits are really around the collaborative use cases That's an acceptable selling point. Pull it to the front and center on the site. Do not just mention that it's better for collaboration, demonstrate it. Right now, copy on the site is centered on ease of setup which, to me, is a poor feature to justify ceding control of dev workstations.