[TriLUG] Developer environment for starting programmer

[Ron Kelley]

Thanks everyone for the fantastic suggestions!  These will give me plenty of options to work thru with my son.

And, I really appreciate the quick reply - especially given the holiday week!

-Ron



On Dec 23, 2014, at 1:41 PM, Igor Partola <igor at igorpartola.com> wrote:

> While this thread is full of great suggestions, I'd like to offer a couple
> of thoughts as well.
> 
> First, don't have him start with vim, git, command line, SFTP, etc. He is
> interested in web development, not in new editors or version control
> systems. These things are fantastic tools (indeed I use them literally
> every day of my life), but they are also a barrier of entry. The value of
> knowing how to use VIM is not much if you could have spent the time
> learning how to write code. Eventually, introduce these things, but at
> first, find a simpler way.
> 
> I can think of several ideas. First, and simplest to set up is sshfs +
> whatever local editor he's comfortable with. I worked with a developer that
> cut his teeth on GEdit. Sublime is a decent advanced option, and is one
> step closer to vim. Even Eclipse could be used for this purpose, though I
> wouldn't recommend it to a beginner without an expert looking over his
> shoulder at all times. The problem with this setup is that depending on
> where the remote host is, and how unreliable the network is, you could run
> into issues with the FS locking up.
> 
> A slightly less nice alternative is using SFTP and having a local editor
> save files remotely. This doesn't suffer from the sshfs locking up problem,
> but is slower.
> 
> If you want him to continue to do all his work on your LAN (vs having a
> server running on the Internet), you could use Vagrant. This tool is
> invaluable, and mostly stays out of the way. For those not familiar,
> Vagrant wraps the functionality of VirtualBox (and other similar things),
> and controls the VM it spins up from the command line. Its magic is in the
> ability to create a mounted filesystem inside the VM that contains your
> code. Thus, you edit the files on your laptop, and they are instantly
> available inside the VM. It also can map VM ports to host ports: one of my
> projects maps VM's port 80 to my laptop's port 8080. That way I hit
> http://localhost:8080 and get the response from the VM. Making this work
> requires one line in a config file. Let me know if you'd like for me to
> elaborate on this more, or just hit up
> https://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/getting-started/index.html.
> 
> I use Vagrant daily to develop for Linux servers while working on a Mac.
> 
> Igor
> 
> P.S.: Don't use SVN. Outside of projects that use it for legacy reasons,
> there is no good reason to use it. git (or even mercurial) are
> fundamentally better, and much more useful on the job market/at work.
> -- 
> This message was sent to: Ron Kelley <rkelleyrtp at gmail.com>
> To unsubscribe, send a blank message to trilug-leave at trilug.org from that address.
> TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug
> Unsubscribe or edit options on the web	: http://www.trilug.org/mailman/options/trilug/rkelleyrtp%40gmail.com
> Welcome to TriLUG: http://trilug.org/welcome