About six years ago (as a holdover until I went full homelab, which I never did) I built a machine with some spare parts, a $40 Xeon E5-2650v2 (8 core Ivy Bridge), and one of those Machinist motherboards.
Initially it was just for home server stuff (ZFS array for storage/backups, Plex, Vaultwarden, etc) but then I wanted to experiment with a remote dev environment using LXC/LXD.
I now do all my web development (mostly back-end, Python and C#) on that machine via tmux and VS Code remote SSH. I'm sure if I was running my browser on it it might painful given the slow single-core performance, but honestly I've felt zero need to upgrade it. Once the RAM-pocalypse is over I'll probably look at doing so just for reliability's sake.
Initially it was just for home server stuff (ZFS array for storage/backups, Plex, Vaultwarden, etc) but then I wanted to experiment with a remote dev environment using LXC/LXD.
I now do all my web development (mostly back-end, Python and C#) on that machine via tmux and VS Code remote SSH. I'm sure if I was running my browser on it it might painful given the slow single-core performance, but honestly I've felt zero need to upgrade it. Once the RAM-pocalypse is over I'll probably look at doing so just for reliability's sake.