Talk Notes for The End of Localhost (Infobip Shift 2022)

Slides

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1pvBf4Kw8CrXFef4jcfExpaRds5GuTe6FOnqk5g6vGmk/edit?usp=sharing

Photos

Talk Plan

• opening
  • returning to the mainframe
  • personal computer
  • going back to the mainframe
• personal story 1
  • lets say you are a fullstack developer
  • frontend and backend on laptop
  • iteration speed fast
  • 1.0 then you get serverless religion
    • frontend on laptop, backend on cloud
    • redeploy speed slow
  • 1.1 create a local mock server - netlify-lambda
    • ping the mock server
    • CORS - proxy
    • bugs:
      • netlify identity
      • netlify routing
      • env variables
  • 1.2 create a bigger mock server - netlify dev
    • compile netlify routing engine to wasm
    • pull down the env variables
    • more bugs
      • netlify forms
      • netlify build
• personal story 2
  • aws - lambda and database
  • local mock cli
  • very slow deploy
  • trigger only one at a time, and super slow
  • so we built datastore - full clone
  • redeploy was super slow <- look up my modernwebpodcast livestream? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA3TFymZlW4
  • more broadly
    • database replication
    • faking, seeding
    • stripping out PII
• personal story 3 - temporal
  • docker - works on machine, ship machine
  • dont run docker compose in production
  • ok… k8s?
  • cant run k8s on the laptop
  • wrong version of go, node, need to set up mTLS certs, etc
  • saas service providers
• summary
  • if the browser reduced operating systems to “a poorly debugged set of device drivers”, then the cloud is reducing the dev machine to a poorly maintained set of environment mocks.
  • sisiphyean battle
  • one clap if you ever worked on a system too big for one machine
  • two clap if you ever had something work in dev and fail in prod
  • three claps if you ever started a project and realized you had the wrong environment
  • four claps if you ever wrote this kind of code - if localhost then x, then y
• end of story time
• start of endoflocalhost pitch
• play clip of sam lambert
• tweeted this out and got a lot of responses
  • i want to code on a plane
  • cold dead hands
• Reason 1 - validation by others
  • future is here, just not evenly distributed - list bigcos that have moved to remote dev
  • guillermo ipad photo https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1274766898530357249
  • ok it works for bigcos but what about me
• Reason 2 - ephemeral, powerful dev machines in the cloud
  • power: resources, saas services
  • bootstrapping: new machine
  • control: locking down what devs do
  • one solution that has all 3
  • access - 2k machine for AI SOTA. get it down to 200 chromebook.
• Reason 3 - cloud eating outer loop vs inner loop
  • deploy previews - netlify, vercel, heroku - useful?
  • CI/CD - done deal (jenkins, circleci)
  • latency: have you heard of the speed of light?
    • outlook -> gmail
    • game streaming, browser streaming
    • movies/TV -> netflix
    • adobe -> figma
    • sourcegraph, copilot
  • independence
    • food, water, electricity
  • personal preferences
    • having local dev but linking cloud dev
• Solutions that are out there
  • dont forget ivan’s codeanywhere
  • entirely in browser
  • remote server, local editor
  • branching environments
• Still not good enough
  • latency of netlify drop, cli
  • branching is still quite new
  • edge compute as the last mile?
  • language server protocol shows you can have client diversity
    • environment branching protocol???
• warnings
  • new privacy and security concerns
• Closing arguments
  • not selling you anything
  • git -> branches are throwaway
  • branching for code vs branching for environments
  • commoditization of technology
    • from pets to cattle
  • closing meme