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Alex Morton
Alex Morton

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Local Set-Up: Check!

This post was originally published on January 7, 2021 on my blog.

Felt so proud of myself today at work for finally getting my local computer set up for everything.

Although I did have a bit of slight anxiety about exiting out of the programs because I was nervous about not being able to set everything up again. But I think that's normal, and I'm just looking forward to when this all seems like second nature (it usually comes sooner than we think!).

I also made sure to fully document my set-up process. Especially since I'm on Windows for the moment, the process is super convoluted, so I wanted to make sure that I was creating a roadmap for myself to be able to accurately retrace my steps (and at times, missteps).

That doc actually ended up coming in handy because I was able to also share it with my team for a closer look at how to go through the installation process on Windows.

Onto Day 4! Going to work on getting more familiar with Tailwind CSS and Eleventy today so that I can jump into my first official pair programming sesh (ahh!)


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Top comments (4)

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aaronmccollum profile image
Aaron McCollum

What is a local environment? Was this like downloading languages onto your computer and adjusting settings in your code editor?

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alexlsalt profile image
Alex Morton

Hi Aaron - good question! It's basically setting up the projects you're working on in your own code editor and making sure you have any outside programs that are also necessary for the projects.

So, for instance, yesterday I set up our team's website and app on my computer/VSCode - in general, this can be done by cloning the project into your own computer through Git/GitHub.

Because we're using Rails, I needed to install Rails and PostgreSQL (for Rails databases) onto my own computer. To install PostgreSQL, I just downloaded it from their website and got it running through a terminal in Ubuntu.

Does that make sense? I know it can seem very confusing!!!

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aaronmccollum profile image
Aaron McCollum

Yep, this makes sense! I had always heard developers talking about it but never really knew what that meant. Thanks for the explanation!

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alexlsalt profile image
Alex Morton

Of course!!!