

Do you want to install Visual Studio Code? Cool, that will take several hours to make its way through the bureaucracy, and the list is never updated because developers take the path of least resistance. Adding it to the list involved multiple steps, and, in some cases, approvals. Until you see your favorite tool missing or the version on the list is three years old. The tools I've used have a web interface where I selected the software I wanted to install on my machine, which sounds great. The second bucket contains heavy-handed tools like SCCM. It made a lot more sense for a core Windows image, with the latest patches, to be created and let the developers go from there. Who will maintain that image? How often is that image going to be updated? What often ended up happening was the developers spent more time updating and uninstalling old tools that it actually slowed them down. It feels like a week hasn't gone by without Visual Studio bugging me to update to the latest version. Except, developer tools release new versions all the time.

They'll be ready to go before they walk in the door. Is a new developer starting? Order a new laptop, install the image, and the developer won't have to set up anything. Hard drive crashed? No worries, swap out the hard drive, use the image, and the developer is up and running in under an hour. People talked about developer images like they were better than cold drinks on a hot summer day. The first bucket contained the developer image. Every one of them ran into the same question: How do we get developers going quickly? The proposed solutions always fell into one of two buckets: I worked for a variety of companies before joining Octopus Deploy.


I went to university back in the days of Windows 9x/ME. Back when I was at university, I would reinstall Windows every six months or so. All of this reminds me a lot of my university days. Next up, find all the websites, then manually download and install all the necessary tooling. The first step is to crack open IE Edge to download Chrome, Firefox, or any other browser. However, that feeling of bliss is quickly broken, as it is time to install the applications and frameworks needed. With the hardware we get these days, the computer is screaming fast. There is nothing quite like a fresh install of Windows, especially on a developer machine.
