+1 for a remote dev box. ssh/tmux/mosh and Emacs.

I really like being able to read some tech on my iPad, see something I want to try, and 5 seconds later I am SSHed/Mosh'ed into my remote dev VPS.

EDIT: that said, I do have Lima installed on my M1 MacBook Pro.

I am consideirng going pure ipad + ssh an AWS instance as a dev environment. i already just use ipad + ssh local machine. would have as much automation as possible to spin things up/down when developing. I don't know how I'd set this up to be nice and seamless just yet.

Pay for 3 years of AWS savings plans to make it cheap. Perhaps run a permanent instance for small things, make a setup that lets me spin up super power machines when i actually want to build.

Most of the time I'm at my ipad remoting in Im not actually compiling, just editing. I can just edit locally and pay for the few seconds/minutes it takes to build..

because honestly after about 3 years i always want to upgrade

and i can get windows that are completely functional for me on remote monitors with ipad now. just starting to wonder why im paying for physical compute power but 99% of the time browsing the web and editing code but not building it.

I might try to talk you out of that.

I do a ton of work on my iPad Pro: writing, research, using Google Colab for model development, and my beefy VPS remote dev box.

All that said, having good Linux and MacBook Pro laptops with a really large external monitor is sometimes very effective.

Depends on what I am working on.

It's interesting to compare how soon the VPS's total cost will reach the coat of an MBP. Even a relatively beefy VPS which is $30 / mo is only $360 / year, like a cheap used Linux laptop.

On the other hand, it has much much less CPU than an MBP, and usually no GPU at all.

On the third hand, the cloud allows one to quickly start more VMs, and to shut them down as quickly, something that's possible but a bit more limited on a laptop / desktop.

Why pay for a whole month though? Depending on your work, spin it up and down as needed. If you're just building a binary you only need it up for minutes or seconds. Been on my mind lately. Lot more sandboxing too. And if you want to build fast you can just scale up your instance since its so short lived. Want to switch from x86 to ARM? no problem. Spin up 40 of your current app? no problem.

That's fair. But above I read about a dev box with Emacs running on it, etc. You likely don't want it to be too short-lived. You can switch it off during night, of course!

I especially like having a few VPSs on GCP, each with specific software installed. For example, I have one with Clojure and Python bridge set up. I rarely spin these up, but the disk charges are cheap so I can just leave them in a halter state until I need them.

it's all sshfs.. afaik they're looking into changing that. i don't have the i/o issues but always backup any files in the vm as they tend to get lost at some point.