Recently my Mac blew up. Only figuratively speaking, but it was enough of a problem that it’s dead and not coming back. Consequently I’ve abandoned writing software on a local machine for the time being, at least until Apple update the Macbook Pro, and then only depending on whether a new one is worthwhile.
Until then I’m experimenting with “zero cost development”. What that entails is essentially writing code without spending a dime on any tools, infrastructure, or services. It’s free tiers almost all the way down. I’m going to cheat a little bit. For starters, I’ve already got a Chromebook. It’s a very basic Chromebook (2GB RAM, 1.6GHz Celeron, 11” screen). It was about 1/10th the cost of a Macbook at £170, which is awesome, but that’s clearly not even close to being free. I can’t quite figure out how I’d write code without a computer though so nevermind. Also I already have a domain. I’ve owned it for years but if you don’t have one then you can’t really put things online in a sensible way, so that’s about £10 you’ll have to spend.
Fortunately that’s where the spending ends.
I’m lucky enough to write code using tools and languages that are all open source, free, and really nice to use. Most of what I write is JavaScript. It’s all built using Webpack. There’s testing with Mocha, Chai, Jest, etc. There’s linting with eslint. There’s a bunch of other things in there as well depending on the project. It all works nicely.
I store the source for everything in a free github.com account. Github is fantastic. While I realise that it won’t suit everyone I stick with a free account because I strongly believe in coding in the open. People can look at my projects, copy them, improve them, and generally do what they want with them. I write code because I enjoy writing it; if other people can make something of what I enjoyed writing then all the better.
When it comes to putting things online I use Netlify. This blog post is on a Netlify server. Netlify is free for small, basic things and it works damn well. I can push code to Github and Netlify will pull it to their servers, build it, and host it. Set up was a breeze, and it’s never been down as long as I’ve been using it.
Lastly, and this one largely is new to me so it may change, there’s Codenvy. It’s a Dockerised web server integrated with Eclipse Che (a browser based IDE). After a few hours of tinkering with it I’m very impressed, so it’s going to be my go to dev environment for a while. Watch this space.
All this goes to show that you can write software, in some reasonably competent manner, without needing to spend thousands on hardware and software tools.
Maybe I won’t need to buy a new Mac after all. But then again, maybe I will. Because they’re shiny.