The Cloud is Your Development Environment

Nader Dabit
4 min readOct 5, 2021

Provisioning ready-to-code developer environments in the cloud

As a developer, one of the things I’ve grown accustomed to is constantly moving between various projects, their required dependencies, and versions of those dependencies.

Here is a typical workflow that you may be familiar with:

  1. Select project
  2. Check dependencies
  3. Checkout branch
  4. View readme
  5. Install tools and dependencies
  6. Run build
  7. Run test
  8. Start coding

We are seeing a rise in cloud developer environments that abstract and automate these steps away, removing friction, improving developer experience, and speeding up development time by just making things easier.

In contrast with the above workflow, what if it was this simple?

  1. Select project 👩‍💻
  2. Start coding 🚀

Over the years we’ve seen the iteration and maturation of this idea, with projects like Replit, StackBlitx, CodeSandbox, JSFiddle, and countless others improving over the course time.

The obvious end goal here was to make it so that anyone, on any machine, anywhere in the…

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Nader Dabit
Nader Dabit

Written by Nader Dabit

Full Stack Product Engineer, Author, Teacher, Director of Developer Relations at Avara