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Why homogenous dev setups aren't the best idea

Antonin J. (they/them) on June 18, 2018

I wanted to write a quick blog post on why it's important for developers on a team to use different setups to develop. Why it's important to have L...
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tag hatle

Randomly rotating your browser usage is such a good idea! I find that I often have to "force" myself out of my comfortable box with things like that, so rotating what you use randomly sounds like a great way to normalize that experience.

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Yury

for me, using different browsers for home and work helps a little bit. but randomly rotating browsers I'd probably spend at least an hour just importing my bookmarks, installing extensions and reentering credentials for every website I visit

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tag hatle

That's very true, even on a personal level I've noticed that in my slow migration from Chrome to Firefox. I imported everything I could, but I still have to re-enter credentials on most sites, which is kind of a pain! I'm doing them as I go along, wish I didn't have to though.

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Antonin J. (they/them)

same! It takes some getting used to. I've been using Firefox and going back to Chrome isn't entirely comfortable. Going to Edge wasn't comfortable either but it's not a huge leap

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John Costanzo

I like the idea of trying to have have developers that belong to all the 3 religions. Most guys run and say, I want a Mac, or the other heavy side is Windows. I worked at a company that made us use Windows. I installed Virtualbox and had Linux on there really quick. What your suggestion, I believe will inadvertently gets developers to do cross browser/OS testing and not even know it

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Antonin J. (they/them)

ha! It's interesting because I love Linux and nearly installed it as my main OS on my laptop (but ended up with Windows...). I also really like Windows so I definitely gravitate away from macs haha.

But yep! They do browser testing without realizing it!

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Jibin Philipose

I am a windows user who also uses Linux sometimes, edge browser is something which I find difficult to configure my web applications and my sweet spot is chrome or developer firefox.

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Antonin J. (they/them)

What difficulties do you find with Edge?

I'm still learning about using it for development. I've got my DOM explorer and my console, I hope this experiment won't bite me in the butt when I need to start setting breakpoints!

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Jibin Philipose • Edited

For beginners edge can be tiresome because some features of css just doesn't work with edge and other compatibility issues and I guess that's the most common complaint about edge by most of the web developers but I guess you're an experienced dev in web development so you must already know workarounds for some properties or compatibility issue, but as I said when I develop web applications first I try it on Chrome and then Mozilla I have very less experience with web development in edge.

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Elliot Derhay

"novice" == beginner

Just a friendly heads-up. πŸ™‚

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Jibin Philipose

Thank you for the heads up, edited it.

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Brian Hanna

I've struggled just to access localhost with Edge. Since it's not a traditional desktop app you have to jump through some hoops to do local development with it

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Brian Hanna • Edited

I still do frontend development for IE11 on the regular, so switching up browsers is a must. I keep a Windows laptop handy to test IE and Edge.

However, I refuse to use Windows for development. I spend more time trying to manage my PATH and my dependencies (good luck getting node gyp to run consistently on outdated, enterprise-managed Windows installs) than actually doing development. If my company would let me use Linux I absolutely would, but they won't. So my options are a Windows machine running a Linux VM or Mac. Pretty easy choice for me

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Elliot Derhay

I do agree with your main point, but my Windows experience hasn't been as flowery as yours unfortunately. πŸ™

Windows Update tends to cause my hosts file to get cleared and my graphics profile to be set back to the defaults. Sometimes my sound driver gets uninstalled too.

But there usually is better supportπŸ’²πŸ’²πŸ’² from software and hardware vendors than for Linux (as much as I'd love to switch to Linux permanently 😸).