"I'd ask most developers to start their day in Cloud9" -- hmm, no. Most developers I know have powerful computers (many of them are gamers), so it's wasteful not to maximize the ROI.
Also, not everyone has fast/reliable internet all the time :)
Author here. Similar reply to one I did below, but a significant amount of developers I work with in enterprise or corporate contexts don’t have this similar situation. Cloud9 can be fairly liberating for them short term, especially while learning the ropes of AWS.
The majority of HN readership I’d encourage to continue using their own tooling, you’ve got fast internet, unrestricted access and powerful equipment.
That all said, I default to Cloud9 these days just so I can bounce around machines and have a consistent dev environment when I need it. A lot of my daily job is meeting teams where they are and helping them be productive fast as possible so I need to stay semi-fluent in most operating systems.
Yep! They work great in many situations. However, Cloud9 is quite a bit more usable and stable on something like shaky/inconsistent airplane wifi. It’s also way less friction to setup and tear down 3 or 4 Cloud9 instances in a day compared to workspaces.
I treat Cloud9 like any other ephemeral editor process. Need a new editor window? Cloud9 project. Done for the day? Commit everything I care about. Tear it down.
That said, I frequently spin up Windows workspaces to test software or workflows if I’m writing a guide or content.
Also, not everyone has fast/reliable internet all the time :)