[Banking-pm] What does your development environment look like?

[Peter Corlett]

On Wed, Feb 07, 2007 at 07:21:34PM +0000, Nik Clayton wrote:
[...]
> It's no exaggeration to say that in my current role (and one of the
> reasons for leaving my current role) the Perl development environment
> consists of Putty, a copy of vi(1), and a development server located on
> another continent.

Real vi or one of these new-fangled upstarts with syntax highlighting? If
the latter, you're doing better than my first job where you had to telnet
(yes, telnet!) into a gateway box (a 486), and then use its menuing thingy
to telnet from that down a congested ISDN line to a misadmiined old IRIX box
with the CPU power of a hamster.

If you wanted to transfer files, you'd FTP to the gateway box, and then
telnet to the gateway and run command-line FTP from there.

Building a Linux box out of the junkpile and a bit of deviousness with
expect got us tunneling all sorts of interesting protocols after a while.
Tunneling is my natural approach to broken networking policy. (This message
brought to you by the letters TCP and the number 22.)

> Now I know there are those that will immediately launch in to a 3
> Yorkshire man sketch ("vi? We had to dig the bits by hand out of the local
> coal mine") at this, but I'd be interested to find out:

> a) What your uncustomised development environment looks like (i.e., you
> sit down on day 1, what does/did the company provide as a default?)

I had a PowerMac running Tiger, and the password they gave me didn't work.
Making the machine work was a "priority" and three days later somebody
turned up with a Red Hat CD. I got a manager to wave a Clue Bat and ended up
with an "unmanaged" Mac. Most machines are "managed" in that they're so
locked down that it prevents actual work being done.

> b) What sort of freedom/latitude you had to install your own tools (Emacs?
> Eclipse? Particular debuggers? Other tools?)

I eventually managed to get root on my desktop, and it's slowly accumulated
loads of FOSS crud.

But I'm working for a newspaper (the more uncharitable might call it a
not-for-profit) rather than a bank. I'm hoping that joining this list might
change that :)