Development Philosophy 101: Local Development, Starring Lando

If..
.. you want to bring a new developer on at your company, and get them to work as fast as possible ..
.. you have a few developers using OSX, and a few on Windows ..
.. you need to quickly shift gears from your main project to help on something else ..
.. not all your clients can afford full-scale dev servers ..

 

.. then you probably want a local development solution.

 

A huge obstacle for many development teams is having a fast, portable and extensible set of tools for local development. But if the benefits are so huge, why is that such a struggle?

 

Philosophy. That's right, we can learn a thing or two about the importance of doing things right from those statues of old wine-drunk peoples' heads. Many teams who have the desire and the willingness to improve their processes fall short of their ideals because they don't first identify the reasons for those ideals.

 

My goal for this session is to explain why it's important to have a strong technical philosophy, and how that can inform all kinds of development decisions. We'll use local development as the case study. I'll generally introducing the topic of local development, compare options, and run through some real-world examples with "so hot right now" toolkit Lando.

 

In the extended session, I'll also go through common values problems faced by development teams, and how we can use a technical philosophy to overcome them. For instance, we often value speed in development – like quickly fixing a bug, or delivering a new feature in time for a client's event. But if we make a huge mistake and bring the production server down, then our desire for speed was in conflict with our other values like "site integrity" and "not being fired." In life and development, identifying your values and confronting these pitfalls ahead of time can help make difficult decisions easier when they arise. The extended session will also feature more insight into Lando's extensibility, and how it can make your dev team's life better.

 

Buckle up for 90 whole minutes of deep thought. (We'll probably take a Gatorade break in there somewhere so we don't get dehydrated.)