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by jasonpeacock·6y ago·view on hn ↗
Because my local server is my laptop at home with cheap ISP bandwidth; my remote server is in a data center with high-speed bandwidth and much more CPU/RAM/SSD than my laptop.

Why do you suffer to use a local server/internet for development? I've been using the "laptop is a dumb terminal" paradigm for many, many years and I've avoided a lot of headache that I've seen in others trying to get everything to work "locally".

Yes, this means I need to be online to work, but almost nobody works offline anymore - between googling issues, downloading/updating dependencies, and browsing while compiling, having an internet connection is assumed.

2 comments
For me the axis is not computer quality, it's IDE quality. My productivity in a large codebase jumped 10x when I switched from emacs to IntelliJ (for Java). Going back would be like blindfolding myself after I grew up blind and got my eyesight restored once.

Remote development is tricky indeed. Many people run the IDE locally and use its remote development functionality. I run it remotely over VNC.

You run your IDE over VNC?

I've been wanting to try out remote developing for multiple years now, it would allow me to get an iPad with a perfect battery life or an Macbook Air that would tag along all day without charging. But because I cannot work with vim/emacs and my IDEs (IntelliJ) do not support anything like remote development I am stuck with a huge Macbook Pro including a battery draining IDE that cannot be ran remotely. VNC added too much lag for me to use all day.

Latency is a problem indeed, I am lucky to be close to work and have massive bandwidth all the way to my dev box. Without that the experience is pretty poor, and I used to make it work by dropping bit depth to the minimum bearable level.
I used to use Eclipse over X11 over Wifi within my house and it worked fine, no noticable latency.
This is why I love Visual Studio Code. With SSH remote connection it's basically the best of both worlds.
Why not write code locally and push to build/test remote?

I feel like this is the best of both worlds- but it does require some up front effort to build the pipeline

Yes, that works too, especially if you're using graphical IDEs/tools for development.