The article talks about the difference between laptop vs server, but no other comments here so far have really touched on that topic. I think this post isn't about how good or bad cloud/VPS servers are, but really about difference between running on laptop vs servers.
It seems starting around maybe 2012~13, devs in the tech industry started moving from Windows laptops to Macbooks in large scale, and this was when it became much more common to run your server stack locally on the laptop. This was really strange to me at first; since prior to this, I was very used to having "dev servers". I came from LAMP world where we'd write code on Windows, upload code to a dev server, run the app on it and test. This seems very amateur in retrospect, but I also worked in a relatively large unicorn at the time (from 2008 to 2013) and I don't think we were even the only company doing that -- from what I knew, this was pretty much standard practice, especially if you run LAMP stack. Which is to say, it was way more common back in the days to dev on a dev server than on their own laptop. (Maybe that's a point against Windows at the time; about how difficult it was to have a reasonable local dev environment on Windows.)
So when I joined a startup later, and found out how everyone on the team had Macbooks (with no option of going Windows), and everyone ran the entire server app on their laptops (and this was the nodejs world, no longer LAMP), I was almost in disbelief -- are we not to worry about any difference between developing, testing and running this server code on a Mac laptop, vs when deploying it and have it actually run on a Linux server later? After a short while it seemed like it was not really a concern; it seems perhaps either macOS linux is close enough to servers, or node is compatible/high-level enough between mac and linux.
Reading this article is kind of a wake-up call -- no, it's really not exactly the same.
It seems starting around maybe 2012~13, devs in the tech industry started moving from Windows laptops to Macbooks in large scale, and this was when it became much more common to run your server stack locally on the laptop. This was really strange to me at first; since prior to this, I was very used to having "dev servers". I came from LAMP world where we'd write code on Windows, upload code to a dev server, run the app on it and test. This seems very amateur in retrospect, but I also worked in a relatively large unicorn at the time (from 2008 to 2013) and I don't think we were even the only company doing that -- from what I knew, this was pretty much standard practice, especially if you run LAMP stack. Which is to say, it was way more common back in the days to dev on a dev server than on their own laptop. (Maybe that's a point against Windows at the time; about how difficult it was to have a reasonable local dev environment on Windows.)
So when I joined a startup later, and found out how everyone on the team had Macbooks (with no option of going Windows), and everyone ran the entire server app on their laptops (and this was the nodejs world, no longer LAMP), I was almost in disbelief -- are we not to worry about any difference between developing, testing and running this server code on a Mac laptop, vs when deploying it and have it actually run on a Linux server later? After a short while it seemed like it was not really a concern; it seems perhaps either macOS linux is close enough to servers, or node is compatible/high-level enough between mac and linux.
Reading this article is kind of a wake-up call -- no, it's really not exactly the same.