

Ask HN: What's your company's dev environment like? - rpug

We're trying to provide the best dev environment possible to allow our developers to be most productive.<p>A developer's lone MacBook Pro can only go so far, so we want to supplement it with extra resources.<p>We're a Java and Tomcat shop.<p>Looking to see what other people are doing.. we're too big for the Amazon cloud.  Should we give everyone their own developer workstation, or virtualize.. or... ???<p>Thanks
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pbreit
First, one of the best things you can do is let each developer choose their
machines and give them a generous budget. Not only will that likely lead to
the most productivity but it also puts the employee control as well as
discourages complaints.

I don't have Java/Tomcat experience but have yet to run into a situation where
a MacBook Pro was an inadequate development machine. I also don't understand
"we're too big for Amazon".

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mcrider
Whatever they'll do their best work on! Our organization doesn't provide
computers (its not really a company, its a semi-non-profit entity and all the
employees are contractors), but we use Mac, Windows, and Linux and a variety
of environments within. Especially if you're a Java shop, OS doesn't really
matter.

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james_ladd
What did the developers IN your environment say?

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rpug
The developers want something that works.. and is fast. No waiting for builds!

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james_ladd
Are the machines the fastest you can afford?

