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by doubled112 154 days ago
Wanting to be able to use anybody's machine is very strange, agreed.

From a support/IT perspective though, the closer everybody's machine is, the easier the job is.

The last software shop I worked at, we had a default set of tools and configs. It was a known happy path. You were allowed to adventure off of that path, but you were mostly on your own.
2 comments
Alupis 154 days ago
Devcontainers[1] or some similar technology are a must. Use whatever specific IDE you want, but the development environment itself should be identical across everyone on the team.

No more "works on my computer" issues. The environment is always identical.

[1] https://containers.dev/

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MaulingMonkey 154 days ago
> Wanting to be able to use anybody's machine is very strange, agreed.

Very useful if people are struggling to create reliable repro steps that work for me - I can simply debug in situ on their machine. Also useful if a coworker is struggling to figure something out, and wants a second set of eyes on something that's driving them batty - I can simply do that without needing to ramp up on an unfamiliar toolset. Ever debugged a codegen issue that you couldn't repro, that turned out to be a compiler bug, that you didn't see because you (and the build servers) were on a different version? I have. There are ways to e.g. configure Visual Studio's updater to install the same version for the entire studio, which would've eliminated some of the "works on my machine" dance, but it's a headache. When a coworker shows me a cool non-default thing they've added a key binding for? I'll ask what key(s) they've bound it to if they didn't share it, so we share the same muscle memory.

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