[LUNI] What Operating Systems are Developers Using?

[Richard Lynch]

On Thu, October 28, 2010 1:52 pm, David Rock wrote:
> * Jeff Yamada <slouchfuzz3 at gmail.com> [2010-10-27 16:05]:
>> http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2010/10/27/developer-os-preferences/
>
> What this fails to take into account is that the appropriate answer is
> you develop on whatever platform your production environment will be.
> I
> have been burned by development on one platform for a system that will
> ultimately be on a different one, and that ended up causing some real
> headaches.
>
> Regardless of your preferences, _please_ develop in a like
> environment.

Your test/QA process should end up happening:
a) often
b) on the exact same platform as production

But there's no real reason to try to mimic *everything* about the
production environment in your DEV.

In fact, I would hazard a guess that for any serious deployment, it
would be financial ruin for every developer to have an exact duplicate
of a PROD environment.

Actually, I wrote a Cache class a few months back at work that would
let you swap in/out Memcached, Reddis, /dev/shm, or local hard drive
for your cache storage seamlessly for this very reason.  You really
don't care where your cache is stored on DEV versus TEST versus QA
versus PROD, so long as the cache "works" properly.

And the PROD servers had Memcached scheduled to be installed, but not
yet, and I really didn't want to mess with installing it on OSX and
Windows and I am not allowed to install it in the DEV environment, and
the sysadmin was too swamped, so...

I don't know (nor care) about the other languages, but PHP is pretty
immune to Environment differences, so long as you have the same
versions of PHP and extensions, more or less.

Even that, I've found only a couple times that some function I used
wasn't available, and a quick Google turned up a drop-in replacement.

So go ahead, build your app locally in Windows on the beach, and then
with a PROPER test/QA cycle you'll be fine.

If you don't have a PROPER test/QA cycle, you're screwed anyway, so
who cares?

-- 
brain cancer update:
http://richardlynch.blogspot.com/search/label/brain%20tumor
Donate:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=FS9NLTNEEKWBE