Developer environments should be cattle, not pets

The concept "cattle, not pets" refers to treating servers as disposable and easily replaceable rather than indispensable and manually managed. This principle should also apply to local development environments. In this text, the author shares an example from their work at incident.io where they reset their local environment multiple times to maintain efficiency. The company's dev setup involves each developer creating their own Slack app for testing changes against a local server connected via ngrok. Toolbox scripts are used to automate as much of the process as possible, making it easy to reuse them for resetting specific parts of the environment. The author emphasizes that if an environment is difficult and time-consuming to set up or filled with valuable test data, developers may be reluctant to make changes due to fear of damaging their setup. However, regularly resetting environments can help maintain a production-like state and allow for more freedom in testing significant changes or tinkering directly in the database.

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