If you’ve been part of a team developing with Django you will be familiar with the woes of local development across multiple operating systems. “Docker is melting my new Macbook”, “What is zlib and how do I get it?”, “The backend is just returning HTTP 502???”..

Docker & Compose promised to solve it all, and did get most of the way there for us - but we were left with huge performance issues when file syncing a multi-million line repo on non-native *nix systems: namely MacOS. We were left with modern machines that resembled fancy paper weights.

The issues became such a daily problem for us at YunoJuno that they got in the way of shipping, so we went on the hunt for alternative setups and discovered the incredible powers of native, reproducible builds with the Nix ecosystem alongside the potential intriguing benefits of cloud-based development.

This talk will be a journey through the issues we faced, a deep dive into the avenues we went down and all the trade offs we faced on our way to finding something that worked for us. The end result helps our devs ship correct code faster by spending less time faffing with local development pains.

Video: https://youtu.be/Mx3yiE_CJOY