I have a website with a worker process doing RSS parsing that occasionally fails. It would be quite nice to be able to spend 10 minutes fixing trivial bugs from my phone while I'm out and about. Or from my iPad. I'm not doing feature development but this would be nice to have for things that are so easy I could do them now but instead must wait hours or days until I'm back in front of my dev machine.
And actually I have a desktop and a laptop that I do dev work on. More than once I've started a branch on the desktop one night but don't quite get far enough to push it up and the next day I take my laptop to the coffee shop and realize the code is still at home.
I mean there are always going to be niche uses for this.
My point is about corporations adopting this sort of a thing because executives got sold on a fancy feature "Accessible from anywhere" but no one really materializes it for 99.99% of the time they are not coding from anywhere but have to suffer latency the entire time.
> executives got sold on a fancy feature "Accessible from anywhere" but no one really materializes it for 99.99% of the time they are not coding from anywhere but have to suffer latency the entire time.
This isn’t the pitch. Not at all. The pitch is “no code (or IP) on local machines that can be stolen” and “no downtime if laptop breaks… IT desk can keep a stack of chrome books ready for backup”. Combined with something like gmail and google docs, the laptop at some employees WFH house contains no business secrets ever.
I’ve never experienced the slightest drag of latency with this approach. If you’re running a compiled language, the compiler is surely the bottleneck. If you’re doing it for work, they’ll probably set it up so it’s always regionalized close to you from a cloud. Maybe fly.io should pitch this.
As a director in a previous job a few years ago I almost introduced apache eclipse orion to our organization strictly to reduce issues with onboarding and junior devs.
I love when senior devs can set up their workspace how they like, but juniors and onboarders often need lots of handholding. Being able to spin up an IDE with exactly what they need with zero effort is incredibly valuable. We lost days and days of productivity because some developers didn't understand how to manage having both a jre and jdk on their machine.
And actually I have a desktop and a laptop that I do dev work on. More than once I've started a branch on the desktop one night but don't quite get far enough to push it up and the next day I take my laptop to the coffee shop and realize the code is still at home.