I started building this tool for myself for several reasons: 1. My 2020 M1 MBP with 16Gb of RAM started to become frustratingly slow when I had to run the local development stack 2. Sometimes I needed to switch between my Linux desktop and MBP, and continue the work from where I left it 3. At some point I was traveling and tried to work from a train, where the mobile internet was very unstable and things like `docker compose up` and `npm install` would take a lot of time and retries before successfully finishing
First, I researched various options. Most of them felt too cumbersome, and pretty much all of them were requiring a single GitHub repo to start with.
Gitpod seemed the most convenient out of all of them, but I quickly started to struggle with its limitations. At least some docker images weren’t starting at all. And after ditching the idea of using JetBrains Gateway for writing code, I couldn’t make my Gitpod instance to not start it every time I needed to do some coding. Got frustrated and unsatisfied, so as an engineer, I decided to just build it myself.
I already had something of my own running on digital ocean, and I experimented with automating it via their api, so I went with building something that I could use from my terminal, where I already spend the most of my time, and something that didn’t require a server hosted and running 24/7.
Eventually, I traveled to Greece for a month of workation, and this tool has been a life saver for me. I built features, fixed bugs, improved performance of the app I’m working on. All this would’ve been much more difficult and much less productive without this tool.
Would love to hear your feedback and thoughts.
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