To work anywhere, be everywhere.
It’s a cool title right? :) Here is the problem. As a busy developer I find I have more machines and more virtual machines than I can count, trying to keep everything in sync is damn near impossible. Even with the best sync software and online sync services I find that it is still too difficult to keep everything in perfect sync.
One of the core reasons is bandwidth, if you have a lot to sync and especially if you’re doing development you probably have thousands of files to always sync. This eats bandwidth and until Internet2 really gets going I guess it is still a pipe dream. If you didn’t know internet2 starts off at speeds above 100Mbits.
So the solution at the moment I think is too have as much work online as possible, i.e. browser based. So for this I keep email on gmail and docs with google docs, so google docs isn’t that great and local docs sync using mobileme across my macs. I sync what I can over local machines using mobileme and my 20gigs of space with Apple but if a service works well via the browser, that is definately easier.
Coding is always the tricky one – an online SVN repository is a good place to start. Tools however generally need to be running locally … or do they? Coming from the .NET world then yes but now that I’m getting into Rails and other such technologies using a nice editor like TextMate is easy and also shows how development could be in the browser.
Anyway .. that is how I’m rolling at the moment. Lots in the browser and a fair bit a syncing seems to work.
