Shells to the rescue for the mobile developer

Published By zooboole

Before the birth of the mobile application development field, there were, and still are, developers who never stay at one place to work. Just like your author.

We always carry a backpack full of all sorts of equipment ready to be unfolded on any table to start work. It's usually easy for thieves to easily spot us and plan a messy day against us. In recent years I have had many of my friends who lost their computers to thieves coming to pick them through windows or by bike riders who snatch them by the roadside.

It's really a deep pain for a developer and any other professional out there whose work depends on a computer to lose it. Not only you lose your precious data, but it's almost impossible to restart the jobs that you were working on and then be able to achieve the same results. It's just damaging to experience the loss of your work machine. It's equivalent to having your hard drive crash in the middle of a job. The worst is that you lose a lot of time. Recently, I nearly lost a job of $2000 simply because my computer screen broke, and the time to fix it would have cost me the job. I had to buy a new machine and use the hard drive from the broken computer. Still, it cost me some time. Imagine if that was a loss of the hard drive or the entire computer...

Many solutions are out there to help us with this issue such as Github, cloud backups like Dropbox, etc. But we must admit that they do not solve even 10% of this problem. The reason is simply they keep only what I call dead-files. because you only store your data and it stays still, it's not dynamic. You can not for example run a website and have a preview from those platforms. Besides, there are some projects that you wouldn't like to share on Github.

Plus, In some countries, like mine, we also suffer from light outrages. It can become so frequent that it's impossible to get the power that can power your machine.

Now imagine you have a computer in the cloud, just like your desktop machine or laptop, all shipped on the cloud. Your physical machine becomes just like an access point. This means you can even work from your tablet or your mobile phone. You close your physical computer, or your phone, or your tablet, then you come back and your cloud computer is right where you left it the last. Nothing changes as if it was right in a room without kids, unchanged. Now your end-point device can have any issue, you are sure you can still access your data and your project right where you were.

That's exactly the beautiful solution that Shells.com offers. I was touched and impressed by the website when I found it on tuxmachines. It was answering a problem I have, and I prayed for it to be free, but Nooo it wasn't.

It can't be though. On a serious note, it's quite expensive to have such infrastructure. So I went ahead to purchase a small package for myself. Of course, I can cancel whenever I want, and within the first seven days, my money will be returned to me lol. I just love the idea.

Let me show you what it got in the belly

After activating your subscription, you are presented with the following dashboard

Click on "View" to choose the operating system of your choice. In my case, I installed Ubuntu Desktop 20. I can change the OS whenever I want and that's another beauty.

After that, you can click on the thumbnail to boot the machine. Trust me you don't go through the installation process. So it takes just a few seconds to bring your machine on.

Now here I am with a new Ubuntu desktop browsing my website. Isn't it cool?

I tried so many things like we usually do as devs and all went smoothly. I guess it's just cool to have a second option.

To close the talk

So I went on youtube hoping to make some noise in Shells' servers' warehouse, Guess what the sound was right on my physical machine.

Since I am basically streaming my machine, I also wanted to know how fast that could be. It's basically like streaming during another stream. So, I went to watch STRONGMEN VS. SCOTSMEN IN EPIC TUG-OF-WAR and this is what it gives

It's a plain and simple proxy machine. It can help you locate your traffic in a country. This is useful to access content that is maybe blocked in your country.

You can host a web server since it supports the Ubuntu server. The only thing is that it could more expensive compared to some shared hosting out there. Obviously, you will also be in charge of the heavy lifting on your server such as securing it.

It's a fascinating technology with limitless possibilities. I thank we can do more with such technology. I decided to share this to inspire you. If you decide to give it a try, know that I used my sponsored link on Shells URL. Using the link to try it pays me some percentage and it helps me maintain this website.

Apart from that, you are also free to go directly to shells' website and make your experiment.