Creating an application is a laborious and often thankful task, but arriving at the testing phase is a welcome milestone. Personally, I prefer to test as I go because there’s nothing more frustrating that trekking back through hours or even days’ worth of code trying to see where you went wrong. Every time that happened to me, it was inevitably a mistake made shortly after commenting code became unfashionable for that project. Many years later and countless lost weeks reading gibberish mixed with brilliance to locate a simple syntax error and the notion that test as you go has finally hit home as a good idea.
The Changing Face of Coding
I’m a fan of a few developer environments and probably have more code in GitHub than was used to send people to the moon the last time they went when there was more processing power and inevitably more code than in ’69. Lately I’ve concentrated on making a few pounds from Facebook apps. Facebook apps for businesses and not the kind that annoy you when someone sends you invites.
In work we run a cloud server from Dell and its ideal for hosting my projects and even though the apps a browser dependent, I still like to test them on other platforms so I use Dell virtualization software that came with our server setup. I just prefer to test an app in a live environment rather than testing on a local host, then re-configuring everything to test live. It’s something that has obviously stemmed from early experiences of laziness and a lack of code commenting.
When Not in Work – Local is the Way
Admittedly, I could test my apps on my workplace cloud server just as easily from home as I could while in work, but I tend to keep work projects in work and other projects I work on at home separate because it’s nightmare trying to leave something go when I’m on the verge of a breakthrough.
Having already set up XAMPP a few years back, I’ve never really seen the need for anything else. All my personal websites are created in Dreamweaver, which I know is not a hardcore coders preferred kit, but it links well with XAMPP. Most of my sites are bespoke WordPress themes and the XAMPP Apache server is, in my opinion, the best cost-free solution.
Being part of the Dell team, I know we have a great range of cloud server and visualization solutions on offer. Visit the site and browse the solutions on offer.