Hardware

After a long run on MacBook Pros, I switched to an LG Gram laptop running Debian this year. It’s faster, lighter, and less expensive. 

If your development workflow now depends on Docker containers running Linux, the performance benefits you’ll get with a native Linux OS are huge. I wish I could go back in time and ditch Mac earlier.

Containers

For almost ten years I was doing local development in Linux virtual machines, but in the past year, I’ve moved to containers as these tools have matured. The change has also come with us doing less of our own hosting. My Zivtech engineering team has always held the philosophy that you need your local environment to match the production environment as closely as possible. 

But in order to work on many different projects and accomplish this in a virtual machine, we had to standardize our production environments by doing our own hosting. A project that ran on a different stack or just different versions could require us to run a separate virtual machine, slowing down our work. 

As the Drupal hosting ecosystem has matured (Pantheon, Platform.sh, Acquia, etc.), doing our own hosting began to make less sense. As we diversified our production environments more, container-based local development became more attractive, allowing us to have a more light-weight individualized stack for each project.

I’ve been happy using the Lando project, a Docker-based local web development system. It integrates well with Pantheon hosting, automatically making my local environment very close to the Pantheon environments and making it simple to refresh my local database from a Pantheon environment. 

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