Friday, November 11, 2011

Musings on Cloud Computing

It's been a while. Life has been crazy, with midterms and projects and concerts and all sorts of goings on.

One side effect of this is that I tend to hop from computer to computer quite frequently. I have my home desktop, my laptop, my work computers (windows and Linux), and the school computer lab computers (windows and Linux). It's no wonder that cloud computing has become an extremely attractive option for me.

Currently I use Google Docs for most of my documents, including class notes (type them out on the laptop during class), course planning (multiple page spreadsheet organizing my course plan several terms ahead of time), time sheets, resume, and game ideas. The organization of Google Docs still leaves something to be desired, but it's been an absolute life saver in keeping me sane and organized.

I recently looked into IDE options in the cloud, and found that while there are a few out there, they all seem to be targeted at web development with no compilers for languages like C++, though some do have C++ syntax formatting. I even found some that play nice with Github, but nothing that exactly matches my needs. I'm hoping this is an area that will continue to grow and that new and exciting tools will be developed to push development to the cloud.

I've had classmates suggest simply using a server and ssh-ing into it, and that certainly is an option. However, I still feel cloud computing is a more intuitive and easy answer.