Gomiworld

Being able to setup your own dev environment for the project you work on is a fairly important skill to posses.
Until recently I was of the conviction that every new developer joining a dev team should start by installing and configuring their own environment. That way new developers would understand the underlying structure and dependencies of the project.

While this has worked out for other projects I've been working on I've now learned that in some cases this is a bad idea. Such is the case for a large project that I'm currently working on. The project has gotten so complex that setting up a workstation with a complete dev environment can take 1-2 workdays. The task is also so quirky that it, in almost all cases, requires the assistance of a senior developer. On top of that the dev team has in the last month and a half grown with ~200%. You don't have to be a math professor to realize that this is a huge waste of time.

The solution we applied was to use VirtualBox to run a pre configured environment. This reduced the time it takes for a new developer to get to the point where they can contribute, to a few hours at most.
Great success!

The quirk

We did run in to a minor caching problem with VirtualBox and Lighttpd. When the following conditions were true, lighttpd would sometimes corrupt static files.

• VirtualBox has a shared folder with the host system
• Lighttpd (or Apache for that matter) reads files from the shared folder

Fortunately the solution was simple enough, just tell Lighttpd to use 'writev' to read files by adding the following line to lighttpd.conf.

server.network-backend = "writev"

:)