Cloud development feels clunky, but it shouldn't. Cloud development should be a superpower.
It feels great to have builds and tests fly. Or be able to use a new tool without having its dependencies clutter up your system. Or share your environment with others (either because it works or it doesn't). That's how cloud development could be.
But that's not what we have.
Online IDEs railroad you into their ecosystem. CI/CD systems are annoying to configure and debug. Cloud providers have chosen prod as their "happy path," prioritizing operations over developers.
Using compute that isn't on your laptop ends up feeling like making a ship in a bottle: you have this tiny aperture to work through with awkward tools.
And yet, cloud development's potential remains. It just needs to get out of your way. Your laptop should be where you can develop comfortably with whatever tools you want, but have your CPU seamlessly somewhere else. No ops required, just "local" development with the tools you know and love.
With rx, we've done just that. It's a ground-up rethink of how cloud development should work in the real world, with real projects. rx takes care of all of the ops and inconvenience and allows you to just code the way you normally would, seamlessly syncing everything back and forth under the hood. It's as though you attached your machine to the cloud with the world's longest bus.
And ironically, this makes rx a love letter to your local development environment: you should be able to run anything you want locally. And anything you don't <waves hand> over there.
We hope you'll join us for the future of remote work.