Jeff Cole - Localless Development
Want a sure-fire way to slow down a team of developers? Give them each a machine of their choice, and have them install whatever software, and make whatever configurations they like, on those machines. Then, have them collaborate on, and deploy to, an application hosted on a machine that looks nothing like what most of the team is running. Finally, don't forget to allow the local setup instructions for the application to wither and decay like an abandoned vegetable garden.
I'm a believer that cloud development environments are the future. Once an application environment is standardized using a tool like Docker, it doesn't matter what platform, software, or configurations a new developer on the team is running. With a one-liner, they can almost instantly be ready to contribute value to the project via an isolated environment of their very own. Spinning up environments tied to individual branches or pull requests for purposes of testing also becomes trivial.
The great news is that services such as GitHub Codespaces and Gitpod are poised to provide hosted solutions for these workflows, today. Meanwhile, developers can continue to use their favorite editors, tools, and configurations via extensions and custom dotfiles. No team member's choice of editor or tooling need be mandated project-wide.
