How do you like to develop through a VM through a VPN to another continent? Because it seems one of our clients is about to enforce such a model.... due to security reasons...

It's terrible. Make sure you take lots of notes on how long routine tasks take you now.

When you need to do it through the VM also track how long it takes you. If it's a large difference, bring it up to the manager and show them how much money/time it's costing the company.

You eventually get used to it though. Shit that used to take me 2 minutes can take 15+ now.

Git/Gist is your friend to share files between the two devices.

And never, ever, ever, get so comfortable that you leave your rdp connection open when you aren't using it.

One of my colleagues did that a year or so ago. Opened up all this nasty porn on what was supposedly his local... Nope, remote VM. He was promptly let go.

@sariel Thanks for the heads-up.

I have a hunch we'll be using citrix, so... could be the VM will only be accessible through a web browser. Rules out the accidental environment mixup, but I reckon it also introduces a few other inconveniences.

I wonder how heavily will it impact my freedom to use hotkeys: which ones will be intercepted by the VM and which ones won't (and mess things up on my local).

@netikras ooh boy... Good luck.

I would love to use a VPN anytime all day.

Citrix is just slow as hell. Works fine until your session is broken and the whole desktop is messed-up.

Charge the client by the hour.
If not, then drop the contract.

@netikras Citrix is even worse than a VM.

My condolences.

@sariel yeah, I still feel the Citrix RemoteDesktop pain from my prev employer, where I had to use it like 5 times

Haven't done another country, but VM through VPN sucks. Be scared

lol.
i remember one time i was sick for two weeks. first thing i said was "just give me access to the repo and i'll be perfectly able to work from home"

i was told that for security reasons that's not possible.
(btw, this was a stupid mobile game with minimal).

after a week of back and forth, the "solution" they came up with was that they installed remote desktop on my workstation, and on the beginning of a workday someone would turn my workstation on, so i could log in to that remote desktop and "work".

cue a week of working on gameplay feel of a very kinesthetically based game (so the response times,timings of animations,controls, etc, were important) via remote desktop at about 10-15 FPS with no sound.

i kept explaining the whole week why the work is going slow and why i'm behind on the schedule of my tasks (also mentioning that first week they wasted by "trying to find a sufficiently secure solution").

a week after i came back i was let go due to "lackluster work performance"

I've done it in my previous life. Local IDE with rsync connected to a VM across the ocean. It wasn't pretty. But if you're going to write code in a browser that's even worse.