using nitrous.io

I recently signed up for the pro version of nitrous.io since they are phasing out the old version that I used for free. So far I am very pleased. Now you get isolated containers to work in with root access. I use the $15/month version that gives you 1G ram and 20G of disk space for a total of two containers. Since I only use nitrous.io for development, I found it easier just use one container (using the entire 1G ram) and cloning the git projects that I am working on.

Some of the things that I particularly like are:

  • The editor built into the web based IDE handles just about all programming languages and file types.
  • There is a separate app than can do two things: sync files between your laptop and your container and also forward ports so you can test run apps in the container and use your local web browser. If you don't want to forward ports, you can use their preview option that opens a new browser tab and lets you test in your browser without any port forwarding.
  • The battery on my laptops last longer if I do builds and test runs in the container. No (or less) fan noise :-)
  • It is easy to spin up a new container for experiments and just delete it.
  • When I am travelling, I don't have to load up a particular laptop with all of my projects - everything is in my cloud container so all I really need is a web browser.
  • Plays nicely with Heroku. I haven't tried it, but nitrous.io is also set up to play nicely with Google Cloud Services and Microsoft Azure.
  • With a little setup, you can SSH into your container from your phone, tablet, and laptops.
  • The nitrous.io web IDE reminds me of the Cider web IDE that I used internally at Google.
  • In general I think I save a fair amount of time having a container always available with my setup.
  • I tend to use my Mac and Windows 8.1 laptops more often that my Linux laptop, and even though I have SSH, git, IntelliJ, etc. set up on all of my laptops, always having a Linux development environment no matter what device I am on is a more consistent development experience.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller facilitated my Dad getting a professorship at UC Berkeley when I was 3 years old. Oppenheimer left Berkeley but Teller was a good friend of my father and I remember him being in our home. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were just leaving to see the new Oppenheimer movie when my Dad called. He mentioned that when I was in grade school he was invited to give a talk at Princeton. After his talk Oppenheimer talked with my Dad and invited him to have dinner at his house. My Dad said Oppenheimer was not well (I think he died of throat cancer soon afterwards) but his wife Kitty carried the conversation. My Dad, Ken Watson, passed away 10 days ago on August 18, 2023.
Read more

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

  As humans we have evolved over a few million years to be both attentive and reactive to danger, live in social communities, and spend much of our time being in the present moment gathering and eating food and socializing. The behavior of rapidly changing short attention to content on social media, too many good short form things to watch on streaming video entertainment platforms, are all rewiring our brains in an unnatural and unhealthy way. I fight back, but in really simple ways that entail little ceremony: Almost every morning I spend 30 minutes scanning Hacker News (about 10 minutes), Apple News (about 5 minutes), and the remaining time on Twitter and Mastodon finding interesting new (mostly tech) things. I make notes in a temporary Apple Note: links of things I may want to research, try, or simply read that day. I like to get this all done at once, and then not feel like I need to interrupt my activities during the day to “catch up” on what is happening in the world. In a w...
Read more

I am moving back to the Google platform, less excited by what Apple is offering

I have been been playing with the Apple Intelligence beta’s in iPadOS and macOS and while I like the direction Apple is heading I am getting more use from Google’s Gemini, both for general analysis of very large input contexts, as well as effective integration my content in Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. While I find the latest Pixel phone to be compelling, I will stick with Apple hardware since I don’t want to take the time to move my data and general workflow to a Pixel phone. The iPhone is the strongest lock-in that Apple has on me because of the time investment to change. The main reason I am feeling less interested in the Apple ecosystem and platform is that I believe that our present day work flows are intimately wrapped up with the effective use of LLMs, and it is crazy to limit oneself to just one or two vendors. I rely on running local models on Ollama, super fast APIs from Groq (I love Groq for running most of the better open weight models), and other APIs from Mist...
Read more