Toolchain spring cleaning

Development setups

Since I don't know when I've been using desktop virtualisation to perform all sorts of development and testing work. There was quite some toil, but utilities like virtualbox combined with vagrant made it pretty usable.

I clearly rember working for a client that wanted to do cross AD domain single sign on with a jboss application running on Linux. Within a day I had two windows domain controllers and a linux system running jboss ready to actually demonstrate a working proof of concept. That to me was pretty powerful.

But with cloud provisoned resources getting easier and cheaper on the one side and mac leaving x86 CPU's behind on the other side, this way of working does not fit well with me anymore.

In 2020 when Apple announced the M1, I grabbed the latest Intel 15" Mac Pro, making sure I could run existing setups for some years to come.

Up till last year I used vagrant setups to test migrations. But now I'm building the same kind of test setups using terraform and Hetzner Cloud.

One the the good things about this, is that an average laptop will be good enough to run it all, no need anymore for an extra beefy machine.

Desktop testdriving

I've been exploring desktop alternatives since, well, since I've been using computers. But to better focus on other priorities I will suspend any serious exploration in this area. Running al sorts of operating systems has been great fun (and in part still is), but I do not expect things to dramaticly change in the coming years. The choice of desktop operating for me is very much influenced by the ecosystem it has to run in. I've already experienced on multiple occasions that alternative desktop software can replace 95% of the functionality, but in the end there are always minor things that cannot be easily addressed.

That should simplify things

With desktop virtualisation and alternative desktop operating systems from my need to maintain/know list, I should find a bit more time to focus on other areas I want to explore :-)