To the cloud

Last weekend I decided to decouple my development environment from my local machine and move it to an EC2 instance in the cloud. Now, I can work on my projects on any computer anywhere as long as a computer has access to the Internet and a terminal emulator. 

For text editing I’m using Vim - I’ve been using this fantastic editor on my Mac for a while, so choosing this as my editor in the cloud was a no brainer. With my vimrc file in place, it’s just like editing files locally except I now edit files over SSH.

To handle screen multiplexing, I’m using tmux, and I’m specifically using the version that’s compiled with extra support for iTerm2. This makes screen management a little easier when I’m logged in via my own machines, but ensures that I can log in from anywhere. 

I’m not running any major services (nginx/mysql/postgres/etc) in my environment yet, but I do have ruby and node installed for the sake of being able to spin up a project-based application server as needed.

If I do end up starting a heavier duty project (one that requires a dev db or real web server), I can always set up a file watcher to rsync my changes to another server.

Looking forward to seeing how well this works over the next few weeks. Details to follow…