Local dev is great until production gets complex enough that you lose parity. That'll happen even earlier now that we run x86 on the server but ARM locally.
At my company we don't support local dev nor have any sort of staging environment. We have development linux servers connected to prod services and dbs. There are no pragmas or build flags to perform things differently in "dev". Things are gated with feature flags.
It scared me at first but now I think it makes sense: staging is always a pain and doing it this way we avoid parity problems between staging and prod. Local development would be impossible for a system at our scale but I think even a staging setup would result in more defects—not fewer.
Local dev isn't the end, it is the beginning. With it it allows you to get further than you would otherwise - and most importantly, when (not if) you do discover a problem on a lower environment (or prod) it gives you a place to try and replicate it. You run everything locally so hopefully you can make a change to mirror the problem... Not a guarantee but at least you have a good starting point.
Also your local dev should try and mirror prod as much as possible.
Yep. This is one reason I've always ran linux on my dev machine anywhere that would let me - sure, there shouldn't be any difference between OSes, but otherwise it's one more place for differences between dev and prod to creep in.
Heck, in my previous $WORK, I saw differences from local (running Debian) to production running CentOS. Luckily one cluster of Jenkins build nodes were also running CentOS and those caught a subtle incompatibility between system libraries that would have blown up if we had merged and deployed to production. My local Debian testing env did not catch it.
At my company we don't support local dev nor have any sort of staging environment. We have development linux servers connected to prod services and dbs. There are no pragmas or build flags to perform things differently in "dev". Things are gated with feature flags.
It scared me at first but now I think it makes sense: staging is always a pain and doing it this way we avoid parity problems between staging and prod. Local development would be impossible for a system at our scale but I think even a staging setup would result in more defects—not fewer.