Detailed Notes
Welcome back to our podcast as we continue our season on the developer journey. Today, we’re diving into a topic that resonates with many: navigating challenging work environments, or as we put it, “when the coffee hits the fan.” Specifically, we’ll discuss developer disaster recovery and how to manage such situations effectively.
Read More... https://develpreneur.com/when-coffee-hits-the-fan-developer-disaster-recovery
Stay Connected: Join the Developreneur Community
We invite you to join our community and share your coding journey with us. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just starting, there’s always room to learn and grow together. Contact us at [email protected] with your questions, feedback, or suggestions for future episodes. Together, let’s continue exploring the exciting world of software development.
Additional Resources
* System Backups – Prepare for the Worst (https://develpreneur.com/system-backups-prepare-for-the-worst/)
* Using Dropbox To Provide A File Store and Reliable Backup (https://develpreneur.com/using-dropbox-to-provide-a-file-store-and-reliable-backup/)
* Testing Your Backups – Disaster Recovery Requires Verification (https://develpreneur.com/testing-your-backups-disaster-recovery-requires-verification/)
* Virtual Systems On A Budget – Realistic Cloud Pricing (https://develpreneur.com/virtual-systems-on-a-budget-realistic-cloud-pricing/)
Transcript Text
[Music] oh hey there we hit record and we are back back on track so yet another episode uh last time around we talked about stepping away taking a break uh this episode we are gonna talk about something different uh let's see what are some good things to talk about now in this week I'm wondering if there's something we should take on because this week we had the uh the crowd strike Fiasco that like cause all kinds of issues and you know this is this is actually a good one I I think this is something we'll talk about is um personal Disaster Recovery basically uh because we have had I've got some I've got a few stories in my past of situations where we've been in work environments where we had to make do and it's like yeah you could just say okay you know the world's on fire so we're just not going to get work done for a a while but sometimes that doesn't help because that means when the world is not on fire anymore now you got to catch up twice as much and we there's some interesting things that we've done in the past that I've been involved with just uh particularly in the last 15 20 years as technology has advanced and we've gotten beyond the ability you know where we weren't like wired in on a network and all these kinds of stuff and actually I guess it's gone sort of because used to be nobody cared if the networ work down because there wasn't a network and then everything was networked and now everything's Wireless but now you still have to you know you almost always have to be connected particularly as a developer so I think sort of a personal Disaster Recovery plan which is also a little bit of a a road warrior kinds of things we've talked about that some about having a go bag and things like that but I think we can we can revisit that with the what happens when things go wrong in your normal place of work yeah that Mak sense I like that as you started I was thinking funding the environment because I've been doing that a lot lately as the corporation starts to lock us down more and more so like today I got a critical email oh you need to reboot your machine because we're putting Nanny Weare on your machine to lock out all the basically they're controlling everything well then we found out we couldn't hit like stack Overflow we couldn't hit red hat and then they immediately had a production issue and they couldn't support it so yeah I I definitely think uh good topic yeah there's a yeah it's a little bit of a white hat black hat hacker type of thing almost as well so hello and welcome back we are continuing our season when we're talking about the developer journey and today we're going to talk about uh when the uh the coffee hits the fan basically when you're in an environment and it is not a very kind environment that's conducive to getting work done recently there was a company that we're not going to talk about but you may have heard about it on the news depending on how far back this is that you're you know in the future you're listening to this they had some issues and it caused a lot of updates to not update properly and a lot of machines and a lot of systems to be unfunctional for a while I'll even say nonfunctional because unfunctional is not really a word before we get into this one though want to introduce myself my name is Rob Broadhead I am one of the founders of develop andur building better developers also a founder of RB Consulting where we tackle technology fatigue and sprawl and we find ways through simplification Automation and integration to take your big nasty ugly things of technology and streamline them and get it down to something that works well Works solid and is easy to maintain upgrate scale all that good stuff somebody that else that is H pretty much One of a Kind so he's not going to scale very well and you're not going to get too many upgrades at least not until they go into the million dollar man all that kind of stuff Michael on the other side go ahead and introduce yourself hey everyone my name is Michael Mage I'm one of the co-founders of developer Nur and a founder of Envision QA where we help small and midsize companies look at their software stack see what technologies they have and help them either integrate better systems or build something that suits more to their needs so let's talk about I think we've talked before about being like a a road warrior kind of thing as a developer and like some of the things where you have it's useful to have like a lot of different plugs and a lot of different you know ways to integrate your system to whatever it is you're on to make sure that your phone can plug in to make sure that your laptop can plug in but these days most people have a laptop so that allows you to be you don't have to actually be plugged into Power I mean you do at some point but you know you can go for a while without power and sometimes you can go without you know it's most people need the internet but the bonus is and one of the things to prepare yourself sort of your own little Disaster Recovery is have like a uh an external drive where you've got some of your you know your primary source code that you're working on right now if that's feasible or or make sure that you've brought it local even if you're doing if you're using like GitHub or one of of those or get or some distributed Version Control System like that as long as you've brought stuff local you can continue to make branches you can commit you can do all that stuff and then eventually you can sync back and get all of that stuff to like you know line back up so you don't have you can fake it you can also bring you know through things we've talked about like you know Docker and kubernetes and stuff like that you can have an entire system spun up you know virtual servers and all this kind of stuff and it it can take time it can take an investment to make sure that you have that environment available but when everything goes wrong it is useful I will before I pass it on to Michael and get your feedback and thoughts I will share one little story that I have that just sort of like as we were thinking about and discussing the topic for this is this is many years ago it's probably now shoot I don't even know I guess it's probably 15 years ago it's been a while been a day or two as they would say and we were we were working this is back when everybody basically you know nobody worked remote everybody worked in an office and we had a nice big office and we're in a big office building and we had deadlines and we were cranking through stuff and the power went out whole building power went out lost all the internet now we had laptops and they were MacBooks a little Apple ad there basically for you so they even then had serious battery power so you could you could code and be a developer for hours on those suckers before they ran out of power the problem was we had to connect to the internet this is where it's useful to have a a device usually now it's your phone that is a hotspot and we literally are because our manager was a big iPhone guy and this is when iPhones had just come out they just gotten to the point where you could actually I think it was the first version where it was ability to have a Hotpot your iPhone could be its own Hotpot and he walked out of his office said his phone on top of a of a shelf there and then said everybody this is the wireless here's the password and there's like I don't know five 10 of us that we're working on using his phone to connect out to the internet it was like you know 0 g or whatever I don't remember what it was not 4G or 5G I can't remember what it was it was not terribly fast but it got the job done for as far as like you know having to deal with emails and do a you know you you're not going to download you know gigabytes and gigabytes of data but you probably don't need that and if you do you should plan a little bit better so you don't have to in those kinds of situations is think through like how self-sufficient is your system if you get in a situation where you really need to get something done but you don't have your normal work environment if you're a consultant if you're a side Hustler this is the kind of thing that can come up fairly often and does for me where you're out you're not anywhere near your office you're living life and somebody calls with a critical issue and you've got to find a way to you know help them out I mean you could you could always drive back home but it may take eight hours and they're may be down all that time particularly you know if you're working 247 support things like that there's all kinds of things that come up so you know look at like your phone you may be able to do a lot from that these days because there's you know especially if it's a smartphone you may have a tablet you know like a an iPad or something like that you may have like a Chromebook or your regular laptop that you can just you know throw in a backpack that you create with you which yes I'm a geek I do that way too often people know me as a guy that's like I'll sit down at the piano bar and crack out the laptop every so often be like all right I got work to do those are some of the things to think about and it's as always you want to think about those before the disaster happens as opposed to when it happens and on that no no relation to disasters happening I will pass it over to you and get your thoughts on it Michael thanks Rob uh yeah so it's funny your story and how you're talking about the disaster recovery and especially we don't want to name names but you know the uh the screen of death kind of thing but as developers we run into other situations it's not even just the internet goes down or power goes down we run into similar issues as to what happened in the news we could take an update to our IDE oops our IDE is now broken we could take an update to the operating system the operating system shot so building a model or setting up your environment in a way that makes you as basically environment agnostic as possible is key at at least to me uh over the years and why say that is over the years I've gone through different environments be it Windows Linux Unix Mac whatever all of them have the same problems a system update gets pushed down things get shot as400 a wrong patch gets installed you're bricked you now have to restore everything and you're down for hours as developers we are suceptible to little things like that we could go from say Java uh 2 to Java 8 and now the code suddenly doesn't work you we have lots of little things that can break our environment so we have to be very careful and very mindful of what it is that we do to our machines that could impact our work and not just the work but also our customers because when we push that software out we want to make sure that the customer is not impacted by something that we did wrong so the story I'm going to tell is is back at a company uh we were at but before you came on uh when I first came on board we had these very ancient uh archaic machines that barely had 4 gigs of RAM and we were trying to write code on this very minimal uh system requirements we kept running out dis space so this was before Docker and really before VMS to and extent uh VMware had just started out and our Network guy had been using Citrix so he started spinning up some playing around with VM and started spinning up some VM environments and what I essentially did was I created a base environment image and that was the only image that was allowed to go out to any of the developers so all we had to do was we basically just dropped their image reload the image and it pointed to a virtual drive that had all their files in a separate location so they never lost their files we would always once a quarter review any system update security patches whatever we did it in one Silo made sure it worked and then we pushed it out to everyone we never went down prior to that we had hard drives going out uh we had monitors going out we had more hardware issues than you could throw a skunk app I it was crazy now in today's world we have do we have containers we have things that we can set up and now all you need is a virtual disc space or a virtual environment you can do it online you could do it on your computers you can essentially do it anywhere and then you essentially again treat your environment as a silo and if you need to change something test it there if you break it there you're not impacting your development so that's just one approach I would take to saving yourself the headaches of potential disaster from update first off I have to start with the visual image of throwing a skunk at your problems I was just like got to watch out pepul Pew may get a little bad when you do that that is actually a perfect example of of the kind of Disaster Recovery environments that we would love to have this is something that now it's much more feasible to do in the in the world of cloud development and all that kind of stuff it is very easy to set up and I have done this I actually did this for one of the seasons I can't remember how far back we did where I went through the entire thing I did an entire project and I used Amazon's Cloud9 I think it was even it may been before Amazon bought Cloud9 but it was basically working on a a completely virtual IDE so I just logged in didn't matter where I was what machine I was on I logged in it logged me into my machine that was out there yes I needed to have internet connectivity but other than that all my code was there all of the everything I done it was everything I needed my entire environment was there and it was very similar to what Michael just described um although the one he described was a bit more powerful because of you know citric and it was closer and some things like that but the nice thing about that was is like when I came in I use that environment all the time and I almost never had to touch my actual laptop didn't care what was on it didn't care anything about it as long as I could get to a like the the browser for at the Citrix window I could go open up the session and yes we did have problems as we grew a little bit because people would step on each other's sessions we had to have the right s you had about six or seven you know development environments we had set up but then you knew where to go if I'm focused on this I'm going to go to this machine if I'm focused on that I'm going to go to that machine if I need to go fix the database I got to go to this one you know it's those kinds of things allow you to be completely free now you don't have to worry about oh crap I left that on my machine CH so utilize the cloud for that kind of stuff don't be afraid to use things like definitely uh GitHub and places like that for your version control so you can access your source code from anywhere also I make heavy use of Dropbox and have for a long time and there are other tools like that that are commercially available if you want to do your own personal cloud there are plenty of options for that where you basically go get a you know multi-terabyte drive and then you can access it from anywhere as long as you want to take care of this you know security and things like that these things will be they are more than worth their weight in gold when you need them and if you get yourself using them all the time you will find more and more for example that you don't need a high-end laptop when you go upgrade your development laptop or your development machine you just need a way to get to that environment maybe you just need a browser so now suddenly you know maybe it is like a little Chromebook works fine for because you really don't it that thing doesn't matter all that matters you have a decent display a decent keyboard and you can browse to wherever your Cloud environment is and this is becoming more and more common particularly if you're in the world of like Salesforce and net suite and HubSpot and all these things that are you basically you can live your professional life on this site or in this you know software as a service solution and you don't have to worry about it being on your machine and sharing stuff out and all the things that can be involved in that uh closing thoughts yeah in addition to what we've talked about up to this point the other thing that this type of approach is good for is if you are looking at taking on new customers or you have a customer that needs some software written and you're not sure if either your software is going to work with theirs this is where you can build those virtual environments locally test them and make sure they work before you actually impact the production environment if you need more RAM you know ahead of time go buy the ram put it in the cost don't just push your software out and then have 1,000 users turn around and say hey only 10 people can get in because we don't have enough switches these are things that you can test you should be testing and the beauty of it is it is not that expensive to build your own own virtual uh virtualization environment at home or on the web it is also not that expensive to give us some feedback to get something in there throw some comments out there give us give us a little love you know a little like Hey we're spending some time here we're coming into your I know it is a little bit intrusive coming into your your ear holes as we are whether your audio or your eyeh holes if you're watching through YouTube but we love that feedback we'd love to hear from you we' love to hear where would you like us to go next as we're talking through our developer journey and yes we are not done we are only about roughly halfway maybe through the season and we've got plenty of topics ahead even we don't know what those topics are yet though because we're sort of like we're journeying as we go through some of these things and that's worked out pretty good we think so far hopefully you agree but obviously your feedback will help and we can either use your name or we can keep you Anonymous if you want to you know if you don't want to have anything to do with us we get that however come on back hang out with us for a little bit and see where we go with this feedback is always welcome and as always go out there and have yourself a great day a great week and we will talk to you next time bonus material I will say particularly I have lost days in in the past particularly with if react development node development uh Python and Java particularly like Maven environments and stuff where you've got a lot of libraries I think I haven't done I haven't run into it as much in the net world but I haven't done as much in recent years when they've gotten into their whole you know nuggets and all that I forget what they call them but if you're in that kind of an environment one turn off automatic updates like save yourself the headache because it's amazing how often as Michael alluded to an automatic update blows your whole world up and you can lose days the other thing is is if you can if you can get yourself comfortable on a regular basis working in a virtual environment then it will help you immensely when those things happen because you're just you're always in that environment you're used to it and so if something happens and you accidentally take an update or what you say okay I'm going to go back my last backup you know things like that and particularly that's the other thing back up regularly make sure that you you know at the end of the day that you're not just you've not just moved your problems into a virtual environment that also you are doing backups and things like that depending on how you've got stuff set up there are a lot of tools out there you can use like Apple's time machine and then there's all those things out there where you can you can find a lot of ways to back up even huge amounts of data uh you know like a big if you've got a 50 gig 100 Gig 200 gig virtual environment you can have that thing just syn somewhere and just you know update every night while you go to sleep or something like that there's there are a lot of ways to do it just make sure that when you do it you keep that environment pristine and as Michael said is like don't be afraid to like back it up if you've got to do updates or you've got to like you know do an upgrade or something like that back up the one and then come back and then you can go ahead and pull all that stuff down verify it and then you can you know you can say okay I can stamp this as good and move forward okay I remembered I remember okay all right so we've talked about the virtualization we've talked about the environments and everything something that hit me today is power so yes our laptops have you know pretty decent battery power our phones have pretty decent battery power but you sometimes run into situations where you did not bring the right cable or you did not plan ahead with you know Char charging before you got went on that road trip or you lost power in the middle of you know what you're trying to get out for production having battery backups having UBS backups uh generators things of that nature you know in this day and age it is also prudent to think about some other type of power backups to just ensure that you are still working be it's solar or whatever just to make sure that you do have that extra redundancy because you never know you know we get storms out here from time to time a tree may take out a power line might not you never know um so just kind of a side thought on that think about what you have for your existing environment outside of you know your typical utilities what can you do to keep the power on so you can keep working that makes sense and it that is something that I guess I had really thought about but it I have at times the idea of having like either little and they are incredibly like decently priced if you want to have like a a there are solar generators and and ways to capture energy and stuff like that particularly if you go look in the uh the Camping World and things like that there are a lot of ways to get that extra power we worked with a developer years ago that was at a place where um they they were on a you know basically at midnight everything shut down all electricity everything went went dark at midnight and so when that hit he would go out in the back and he had like two hours worth of power cuz he' go crank up a gas power generator and he'd be able to use that for a while I mean there's things like that that you can do so uh you know that power is is pretty you know pretty important to get through um that being said I think that's good enough for now we got to wrap it up we got to get going and uh get back to our work and and all of our stuff so continue as always give us feedback info@ developer.com leave us comments however smoke signals whatever it is face Facebook X developer.com on the the forums you can submit stuff we're happy to hear from you and uh look for you know new suggestions and things like that from you guys that being said go out there and have yourselves a good one and we will be back next time around bushy eyed and brigh eyed and bushy tailed as always and we won't throw skunks at you have a good one [Music]
Transcript Segments
[Music]
oh hey there we hit record and we are
back back on track so yet another
episode uh last time around we talked
about stepping away taking a break uh
this episode we are gonna talk about
something different uh let's see what
are some good things to talk
about now in this week I'm wondering if
there's something we should take on
because this week we had the uh the
crowd strike Fiasco that like cause all
kinds of
issues
and you know this is this is actually a
good one I I think this is something
we'll talk about is um personal Disaster
Recovery basically uh because we have
had I've got some I've got a few stories
in my past of situations where we've
been in work environments where we had
to make do and it's like yeah you could
just say okay you know the world's on
fire so we're just not going to get work
done for a a while but sometimes that
doesn't help because that means when the
world is not on fire anymore now you got
to catch up twice as much and we there's
some interesting things that we've done
in the past that I've been involved with
just uh particularly in the
last 15 20 years as technology has
advanced and we've gotten beyond the
ability you know where we weren't like
wired in on a network and all these
kinds of stuff and actually I guess it's
gone sort of because used to be nobody
cared if the networ work down because
there wasn't a network and then
everything was networked and now
everything's Wireless but now you still
have to you know you almost always have
to be connected particularly as a
developer so I think sort of a personal
Disaster Recovery plan which is also a
little bit of a a road warrior kinds of
things we've talked about that some
about having a go bag and things like
that but I think we can we can revisit
that with
the what happens when things go wrong in
your normal place of work
yeah that Mak sense I like that as you
started I was thinking funding the
environment because I've been doing that
a lot lately as the corporation starts
to lock us down more and more so like
today I got a critical email oh you need
to reboot your machine because we're
putting Nanny Weare on your machine to
lock out all the basically they're
controlling everything well then we
found out we couldn't hit like stack
Overflow we couldn't hit red hat and
then they immediately had a production
issue and they couldn't support
it so yeah I I definitely think uh good
topic yeah there's a yeah it's a little
bit of a white hat black hat hacker type
of thing almost as well so hello and
welcome back we are continuing our
season when we're talking about the
developer journey and today we're going
to talk about uh when the uh the coffee
hits the fan basically when you're in an
environment and it is not a very kind
environment that's conducive to getting
work done recently there was a company
that we're not going to talk about but
you may have heard about it on the news
depending on how far back this is that
you're you know in the future you're
listening to this they had some issues
and it caused a lot of updates to not
update properly and a lot of machines
and a lot of systems to be unfunctional
for a while I'll even say nonfunctional
because unfunctional is not really a
word before we get into this one though
want to introduce myself my name is Rob
Broadhead I am one of the founders of
develop andur building better developers
also a founder of RB Consulting where we
tackle technology fatigue and sprawl and
we find ways through simplification
Automation and integration to take your
big nasty ugly things of technology and
streamline them and get it down to
something that works well Works solid
and is easy to maintain upgrate scale
all that good stuff somebody that else
that is H pretty much One of a Kind so
he's not going to scale very well and
you're not going to get too many
upgrades at least not until they go into
the million dollar man all that kind of
stuff Michael on the other side go ahead
and introduce yourself hey everyone my
name is Michael Mage I'm one of the
co-founders of developer Nur and a
founder of Envision QA where we help
small and midsize companies look at
their software stack see what
technologies they have and help them
either integrate better systems or build
something that suits more to their
needs so let's talk about I think we've
talked before about being like a a road
warrior kind of thing as a developer and
like some of the things where you have
it's useful to have like a lot of
different plugs and a lot of different
you know ways to integrate your system
to whatever it is you're on to make sure
that your phone can plug in to make sure
that your laptop can plug
in but these days most people have a
laptop so that allows you to be you
don't have to actually be plugged into
Power I mean you do at some point but
you know you can go for a while without
power and sometimes you can go without
you know it's most people need the
internet but the bonus is and one of the
things to prepare yourself sort of your
own little Disaster Recovery is have
like
a uh an external drive where you've got
some of your you know your primary
source code that you're working on right
now if that's feasible or or make sure
that you've brought it local even if
you're doing if you're using like GitHub
or one of of those or get or some
distributed Version Control System like
that as long as you've brought stuff
local you can continue to make branches
you can commit you can do all that stuff
and then eventually you can sync back
and get all of that stuff to like you
know line back up so you don't have you
can fake it you can also bring you know
through things we've talked about like
you know Docker and kubernetes and stuff
like that you can have an entire system
spun up you know virtual servers and all
this kind of stuff and it it can take
time it can take an investment to make
sure that you have that environment
available but when everything goes wrong
it is useful I will before I pass it on
to Michael and get your feedback and
thoughts I will share one little story
that I have that just sort of like as we
were thinking about and discussing the
topic for this is this is many years ago
it's probably now shoot I don't even
know I guess it's probably 15 years ago
it's been a while been a day or two as
they would say and we were we were
working this is back when everybody
basically you know nobody worked remote
everybody worked in an office and we had
a nice big office and we're in a big
office building and we had deadlines and
we were cranking through stuff and the
power went out whole building power went
out lost all the internet now we had
laptops and they were MacBooks a little
Apple ad there basically for you so they
even then had serious battery power so
you could you could code and be a
developer for hours on those suckers
before they ran out of power the problem
was we had to connect to the internet
this is where it's useful to have a a
device usually now it's your phone that
is a
hotspot and we literally are because our
manager was a big iPhone guy and this is
when iPhones had just come out they just
gotten to the point where you could
actually I think it was the first
version where it was ability to have a
Hotpot your iPhone could be its own
Hotpot and he walked out of his office
said his phone on top of a of a shelf
there and then said everybody this is
the wireless here's the password and
there's like I don't know five 10 of us
that we're working on using his phone to
connect out to the internet it was like
you know 0 g or whatever I don't
remember what it was not 4G or 5G I
can't remember what it was it was not
terribly fast but it got the job done
for as far as like you know having to
deal with emails and do a you know you
you're not going to download you know
gigabytes and gigabytes of data but you
probably don't need that and if you do
you should plan a little bit better so
you don't have to in those kinds of
situations is think through like how
self-sufficient is your system if you
get in a situation where you really need
to get something done but you don't have
your normal work environment if you're a
consultant if you're a side Hustler this
is the kind of thing that can come up
fairly often and does for me where
you're out you're not anywhere near your
office you're living life and somebody
calls with a critical issue and you've
got to find a way to you know help them
out I mean you could you could always
drive back home but it may take eight
hours and they're may be down all that
time particularly you know if you're
working 247 support things like that
there's all kinds of things that come up
so you know look at like your phone you
may be able to do a lot from that these
days because there's you know especially
if it's a smartphone you may have a
tablet you know like a an iPad or
something like that you may have like a
Chromebook or your regular laptop that
you can just you know throw in a
backpack that you create with you which
yes I'm a geek I do that way too often
people know me as a guy that's like I'll
sit down at the piano bar and crack out
the laptop every so often be like all
right I got work to do those are some of
the things to think about and it's as
always you want to think about those
before the disaster happens as opposed
to when it happens and on that no no
relation to disasters happening I will
pass it over to you and get your
thoughts on it
Michael thanks Rob uh yeah so it's funny
your story and how you're talking about
the disaster recovery and especially we
don't want to name names but you know
the uh the screen of death kind of thing
but as developers we run into other
situations it's not even just the
internet goes down or power goes down we
run into similar issues as to what
happened in the news we could take an
update to our IDE oops our IDE is now
broken we could take an update to the
operating system the operating system
shot
so building a model or setting up your
environment in a way that makes you as
basically environment agnostic as
possible is key at at least to me uh
over the years and why say that is over
the years I've gone through different
environments be it Windows Linux Unix
Mac
whatever all of them have the same
problems a system update gets pushed
down things get shot as400 a wrong patch
gets installed you're bricked you now
have to restore everything and you're
down for
hours as developers we are suceptible to
little things like that we could go from
say Java uh 2 to Java 8 and now the code
suddenly doesn't work you we have lots
of little things that can break our
environment so we have to be very
careful and very mindful of what it is
that we do to our machines that could
impact our work and not just the work
but also our customers because when we
push that software out we want to make
sure that the customer is not impacted
by something that we did
wrong so the story I'm going to tell is
is back at a company uh we were at but
before you came on uh when I first came
on board we had these very ancient uh
archaic machines that barely had 4 gigs
of RAM and we were trying to write code
on
this very minimal uh system
requirements we kept running out dis
space so this was
before Docker and really before VMS to
and extent uh VMware had just started
out and our Network guy had been using
Citrix so he started spinning up some
playing around with VM and started
spinning up some VM environments and
what I essentially did was I created a
base environment
image and that was the only image that
was allowed to go out to any of the
developers so all we had to do was we
basically just dropped their image
reload the image and it pointed to a
virtual drive that had all their files
in a separate location so they never
lost their files we would always once a
quarter review any system update
security patches whatever we did it in
one Silo made sure it worked and then we
pushed it out to everyone we never went
down prior to that we had hard drives
going out uh we had monitors going out
we had more hardware issues than you
could throw a skunk app I it was crazy
now in today's world we have do we have
containers we have things that we can
set up and now all you need is a virtual
disc space or a virtual environment you
can do it online you could do it on your
computers you can essentially do it
anywhere and then you essentially again
treat your environment as a silo and if
you need to change something test it
there if you break it there you're not
impacting your development so that's
just one approach I would take to saving
yourself the headaches of potential
disaster from update
first off I have to start with the
visual image of throwing a skunk at your
problems I was just like got to watch
out pepul Pew may get a little bad when
you do that that is actually a perfect
example of of the kind of Disaster
Recovery environments that we would love
to have this is something that now it's
much more feasible to do in the in the
world of cloud development and all that
kind of stuff it is very easy to set up
and I have done this I actually did this
for one of the seasons I can't remember
how far back we did where I went through
the entire thing I did an entire project
and I used Amazon's Cloud9 I think it
was even it may been before Amazon
bought Cloud9 but it was basically
working on a a completely virtual IDE so
I just logged in didn't matter where I
was what machine I was on I logged in it
logged me into my machine that was out
there yes I needed to have internet
connectivity but other than that all my
code was there all of the everything I
done it was everything I needed my
entire environment was there and it was
very similar to what Michael just
described um although the one he
described was a bit more powerful
because of you know citric and it was
closer and some things like that
but the nice thing about that was is
like when I came in I use that
environment all the time and I almost
never had to touch my actual laptop
didn't care what was on it didn't care
anything about it as long as I could get
to a like the the browser for at the
Citrix window I could go open up the
session and yes we did have problems as
we grew a little bit because people
would step on each other's sessions we
had to have the right s you had about
six or seven you know development
environments we had set up but then you
knew where to go if I'm focused on this
I'm going to go to this machine if I'm
focused on that I'm going to go to that
machine if I need to go fix the database
I got to go to this one you know it's
those kinds of things allow you to be
completely free now you don't have to
worry about oh crap I left that on my
machine CH so utilize the cloud for that
kind of stuff don't be afraid to use
things like definitely uh GitHub and
places like that for your version
control so you can access your source
code from anywhere also I make heavy use
of Dropbox and have for a long time and
there are other tools like that that are
commercially available if you want to do
your own personal cloud there are plenty
of options for that where you basically
go get a you know multi-terabyte drive
and then you can access it from anywhere
as long as you want to take care of this
you know security and things like
that these things will be they are more
than worth their weight in gold when you
need them and if you get yourself using
them all the time you will find more and
more for example that you don't need a
high-end laptop when you go upgrade your
development laptop or your development
machine you just need a way to get to
that environment maybe you just need a
browser so now suddenly you know maybe
it is like a little Chromebook works
fine for because you really don't it
that thing doesn't matter all that
matters you have a decent display a
decent keyboard and you can browse to
wherever your Cloud environment is and
this is becoming more and more common
particularly if you're in the world of
like Salesforce and net suite and
HubSpot and all these things that are
you basically you can live your
professional life on this site or in
this you know software as a service
solution and you don't have to worry
about it being on your machine and
sharing stuff out and all the things
that can be involved in
that uh closing
thoughts yeah in addition to what we've
talked about up to this point the other
thing that this type of approach is good
for is if you are looking at taking on
new customers or you have a customer
that needs some software written and
you're not sure if either your software
is going to work with theirs this is
where you can build those virtual
environments locally test them and make
sure they work before you actually
impact the production environment if you
need more RAM you know ahead of time go
buy the ram put it in the cost don't
just push your software out and then
have 1,000 users turn around and say hey
only 10 people can get in because we
don't have enough
switches these are things that you can
test you should be testing and the
beauty of it is it is not that expensive
to build your own own virtual uh
virtualization
environment at home or on the
web it is also not that expensive to
give us some feedback to get something
in there throw some comments out there
give us give us a little love you know a
little like Hey we're spending some time
here we're coming into your I know it is
a little bit intrusive coming into your
your ear holes as we are whether your
audio or your eyeh holes if you're
watching through
YouTube but we love that feedback we'd
love to hear from you we' love to hear
where would you like us to go next as
we're talking through our developer
journey and yes we are not done we are
only about roughly halfway maybe through
the season and we've got plenty of
topics ahead even we don't know what
those topics are yet though because
we're sort of like we're journeying as
we go through some of these things and
that's worked out pretty good we think
so far hopefully you agree but obviously
your feedback will help and we can
either use your name or we can keep you
Anonymous if you want to you know if you
don't want to have anything to do with
us we get
that however come on back hang out with
us for a little bit and see where we go
with this feedback is always welcome and
as always go out there and have yourself
a great day a great week and we will
talk to you next
time bonus
material I will say
particularly I have lost
days in in the past particularly with if
react development node development uh
Python and Java particularly like Maven
environments and stuff where you've got
a lot of libraries I think I haven't
done I haven't run into it as much in
the net world but I haven't done as much
in recent years when they've gotten into
their whole you know nuggets and all
that I forget what they call them but if
you're in that kind of an environment
one turn off automatic updates like save
yourself the headache because it's
amazing how often as Michael alluded to
an automatic update blows your whole
world up and you can lose days the other
thing is is if you can if you can get
yourself comfortable on a regular basis
working in a virtual environment then it
will help you immensely when those
things happen because you're just you're
always in that
environment you're used to it and so if
something happens and you accidentally
take an update or what you say okay I'm
going to go back my last backup you know
things like that and particularly that's
the other thing back up regularly make
sure that you you know at the end of the
day that you're not just you've not just
moved your problems into a virtual
environment that also you are doing
backups and things like that depending
on how you've got stuff set up there are
a lot of tools out there you can use
like Apple's time machine and then
there's all those things out there where
you can you can find a lot of ways to
back up even huge amounts of data uh you
know like a big if you've got a 50 gig
100 Gig 200 gig virtual environment
you can have that thing just syn
somewhere and just you know update every
night while you go to sleep or something
like that there's there are a lot of
ways to do it just make sure that when
you do it you keep that environment
pristine and as Michael said is like
don't be afraid to like back it up if
you've got to do updates or you've got
to like you know do an upgrade or
something like that back up the one and
then come back and then you can go ahead
and pull all that stuff down verify it
and then you can you know you can say
okay I can stamp this as good and move
forward okay I remembered I remember
okay all right
so we've talked about the virtualization
we've talked about the environments and
everything something that hit me
today is power so yes our laptops have
you know pretty decent battery power our
phones have pretty decent battery power
but you sometimes run into situations
where you did not bring the right cable
or you did not plan ahead with you know
Char charging before you got went on
that road trip or you lost power in the
middle of you know what you're trying to
get out for production having battery
backups having UBS backups uh generators
things of that nature you know in this
day and age it is also prudent to think
about some other type of power backups
to just ensure that you are still
working be it's solar or whatever just
to make sure that you do have that extra
redundancy because you never know you
know we get storms out here from time to
time a tree may take out a power line
might not you never know um so just kind
of a side thought on that think about
what you have for your existing
environment outside of you know your
typical utilities what can you do to
keep the power on so you can keep
working that makes sense and it that is
something that I guess I had really
thought about but it I have at times the
idea of having like either little and
they are incredibly like decently priced
if you want to have like a a there are
solar generators and and ways to capture
energy and stuff like that particularly
if you go look in the uh the Camping
World and things like that there are a
lot of ways to get that extra power we
worked with a developer years ago that
was at a place
where um they they were on a you know
basically at midnight everything shut
down all electricity everything went
went dark at midnight and so when that
hit he would go out in the back and he
had like two hours worth of power cuz
he' go crank up a gas power generator
and he'd be able to use that for a while
I mean there's things like that that you
can do so uh you know that power is is
pretty you know pretty important to get
through um that being said I think
that's good enough for now we got to
wrap it up we got to get going and uh
get back to our work and and all of our
stuff so continue as always give us
feedback info@ developer.com leave us
comments however smoke signals whatever
it is face Facebook X developer.com on
the the forums you can submit stuff
we're happy to hear from you and uh look
for you know new suggestions and things
like that from you guys that being said
go out there and have yourselves a good
one and we will be back next time
around bushy eyed and brigh eyed and
bushy tailed as always and we won't
throw skunks at you have a good one
[Music]