My view on local development in a nutshell is:

• You should be able to spin up and contribute a change within your first day
• You should be able to develop code on the train without an internet connection
  • (this assumes that you have all required dependencies pre-downloaded)

I’m not saying you should, commutes home from the office is a great way to unwind, but can you?

Is your local development coupled to a service which is on company network and requires a VPN connection?

If you are capable of local development on the train, great, if you’re utilising stubs or mocks of backing dependencies to do so, how much confidence do you have in those stubs to be accurate to reality?

Can you execute the same steps as your CI locally easily to be able to make meaningful contributions? (I’m not saying they will succeed because things like authorization exist, but are you at least able to run the scripts without being reliant on the tooling of your CI platform).

This scenario may not come up often, but I was wanting to refactor some code for an internal green fields service that didn’t have overly resilient testing but that did have dependency on another service to start, guess how I found that one out.

That was not a fun train ride because it just lead to bubbling up of frustration of “I want this… I want this… How do I validate this…” and the frustration there was more upsetting to me than any of the code I wanted to write or not having internet.