HACKER Q&A
📣 mavsman

How long did it take you to configure your devbox at your current job?


This often takes much longer than I'd expect. I know there are lots of tools to address this kind of thing but many people have edge cases/excuses that cause them not to use them (well). What is your onboarding process like? And what is your dev environment setup like?


  👤 ttyprintk Accepted Answer ✓
I use the same set of dotfiles for each dev box. You can expect each client to have its own ssh, git, and hooks and scripts, for example Ansible. I recommend getting those all under version control.

Each vpn will have its own dns and subnets. You might reduce context switching by setting those at your firewall or router instead of dev box. I do this for projects with multiple dev boxes, any hardware or server project will have more than one machine that might need to cross their vpn.

Combining several layers of vpn is tedious. For dns, I’ve needed my own local dns server to forward different domains for different clients. The stock dns server on consumer firewall routers often won’t do domain-level forwarding well.


👤 chaganated
Tmux & Vim with a bunch of plugins.

And most of the languages I use are in the OS's package manager. Setup is "apt-get/brew install ..." followed by "hg clone ..." for my plugins and settings.

So, direct answer would be "a few minutes."