This post is a work in progress.

My development environment has changed over the years in terms of hardware but I constantly find myself returning to the same tools over and over again.

Some of my staples:

• Vim
• Screen

I think now is the best time to write about this as any – virtualisation is mainstream and hardware is a commodity. I’ve managed to become completely hardware independent and can easily work from a low-end Lenovo laptop to high-end Apple hardware with little compromise.

I’ll walk you through my set up and how I quickly replicate it across platforms. I’ll also cover how I back up my configuration across the cloud and local storage.

This will be an evolving post as I add more details.

Basics

All my work is inherently dependent on virtual machines running upon a trusted operating system. For local virtual machines I use VMWare Workstation or Fusion and for remote virtual machines, I typically use AWS for heavy work loads and Hertzner for lighter ones.

Local virtualisation

Gentoo 17.1 serves as the foundation for my Linux-based investigations and work.