How to commission developer machines in an agile way?
During the past year – working at AdoMado, I’ve seen myself & our developers wasting a lot of time in maintaining their own dev machines. Package install/upgrade/dependency failures, OS upgrade failures, hard drives failures, the machine not being available physically (in case of laptops), etc – are just a few cases.
Can there be a more agile way of working for developers? Given that the technology stack an organization runs on is often well defined, this should be fairly possible.
Very recently, I came across a project from one of the Slicehost founders Matt Tanase – BluePrint. The project lets you create versionable configurations from an existing installs. Just setup your machine the way you want it to be, run blueprint & wallah, you have a re-deployable configuration. Everything is created as a Git repository, hence any change you make to the configuration – is also versionable.
Next, if we can somehow automate the process of creating the machine images, we will be almost there. Luckily, there’s Vagrant. Its a tool to build & distribute virtualized environments. Blueprint also supports Vagrant.
Add to this, a web based editor (Bespin or Ace) – and you have a perfect recipe for dishing out pre-built images of your technology stack which are just perfect enough to be run on VirtualBox.
Imagine, its the first day of the developer. He can simply checkout such an image from a dashboard, run it on a VM & he’s ready to rock’n roll!
Since all of this is automated, this process can be improved & repeated as many times as one wants.
Sweet, aint it!
Ever since I started working on a Desktop as a full time machine, the only access to after-office-hours machine I have is my wife’s laptop – which being a WinBlows box, creeps me out. Such a setup, even if remotely possible – will give me the freedom I need to stretch my legs & utilize my free time 
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