The Ultimate Development Environment

I’ve been thinking about great Development setups for about 2 Decades. I’ve gotten very good at getting the most out of the Windows machines I’ve used. Windows7 has served me well over the years, and it’s become a nice stable environment for the most part.

So it finally happened this week. After Dabbling in Linux from 2008 I started running hosting servers and managing Linux servers for clients in 2013. But now in 2018 I finally found a very compelling reason to only work from Linux rather than dual boot.

Some background

I started out my Career in the early 2000’s in a small Software Development startup called P37 Solutions.

VB6 Meets Travel Agencies

The company built out software predominantly in Visual Basic 6 and later C# for the Travel Industry to simplify bookings through Amadeus a travel network.

Amadeus was known to introduce a slew of virus infections into Travel agencies and general machines used to be air-gaped from the Amadeus machines.

The Virus Coliseum

A Tech back then told me that once a machine hit around 2000-3000 virus infections it actually got more usable because the different viruses where competing for the same resources to the point that none of them had much success. These machines where so Virus Infected that you’d crash Windows by even attempting to clear anything up. I tried as a rookie, it was a pointless endeavour.

Anything was possible

P37 built out Smaller projects like stock management systems.

It was an interesting time in tech.

• XML was just becoming a standard that would lead to PDF and HTML standards among others.
• CSS1 was in its infancy, we had our first graduate Designer joining at the time.
• Linux had not been thought up yet. And our Dev house had been toying with writing an OS.

Volunteering

As a volunteer Part of my initial responsibilities in the Office was supporting Senior developers by rebuilding their the Windows 2000 and later XP machines.

Back then Dev machines would generally only remain reliable for 3-9months.

Developers where pushing these machines very hard and before XP. Testing Desktop software meant constantly adding DLL’s and registry entries when installing and removing apps created heaps of clutter resulting in early Windows crashes.

Fast Forward 3 months

I quickly got hired 3months later and promoted to building out UI, Debugging and supporting customers (remotely as soon as the first cellular networks landed).

The firm hired a replacement to take care of hardware & OS maintenance while I stepped into a software & support role.

In a few months I Administrated the Windows Servers that ran production code we built.

Back to the Dev Stack

Back then the benchmark I set for rebuilding a Developer machine from Format to deployed was around 4hours.

This included all the tooling and custom components etc. that devs needed.

While it may sound long, most things where a manual process and this time cut the previous timeline by half. Deployment tooling & OS automation have come a long way since then. Many installers did not have terminal extensions.

Plug and Play was jokingly referred to as Plug and Pray in the pre Windows7 world.

We’re really spoiled in the modern OS by loads of automations we take for granted.

So why I switched to Linux

Windows 8.1 the new Vista?

With the introduction of Windows 8 looking much like the historic release of Windows Millennium, I was eager to see what 8.1 would bring.

But sadly 8.1 looked like another Vista release taking effectively double the Ram to boot up that Windows 8 did.

It was not a great situation since you need every ounce of Ram once you start emulating Android devices, or LAMP Servers for WebDevelopment.

Back to Windows 7

I moved back to Windows7 it’s a nice stable environment that works reliably for several years unless you really maintain it poorly and mess it up.

Trying out Development on Ubuntu

I’d been dual booting Ubuntu for a while and found it a wonderful space for Web Development. I moved some of my Front End development to Ubuntu 18.04. it was going great!

Upgrading to Windows 10

Windows 10 rolled around. It was more polished and reminded me of the early days of Windows7. At least it showed potential after it had been around a few months.

But it had one nagging issue. Forced updates was a mistake from the get go. Non-enterprise users where forced to become gineu pigs.

Microsoft had been culling its testing team for some years which has really reduced code quality.

The ultimate update wipes my drive

Anyway fast-forward to Oct 2018.

KB4532693 rolled around, and I was one of the lucky ones to get my drive wiped. But this update in my case low level formatted the drive beyond repair and dropped all partitions including Ubuntu with it Kamakazi style.

Windows7 crashes weeks after install

I moved back to Windows7 and somehow that installation was short-lived. It’s a first experience after decades with Windows installations where I’d seen a double whammy.

Ubuntu - the start of a beautiful friendship

So this was the start of a beautiful friendship between me and my Ubuntu environment.

• It’s fast and efficient.
• Updates are small.
• Redeploying after the crash is a dream.

I’m up and running from backups with my Bitbucket repo’s synchronized and entire development stack reinstalled in about 90min flat.

And on top of that almost everything a Web Developer could ever want is native.