What’s Next?

Yogi Berra once said, “In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they aren’t.” Many remote pair programming techniques are simple in theory, but in practice we have to deal with the fact that you and your pairing partner will connect across two different networks—a task that is often nontrivial.

The virtual cloud server we’ve created in this chapter is a big step toward solving the real-world problems of remote pair programming. It’s one of the most important tools a remote pair programmer can have, but there are many other ways we can create it. Here are some additional tools you might want to try:

ngrok^[57]

This free service lets you create a tunnel from a public Internet address to a port on your local machine. You can share this URL to give anyone access to a service running on your development machine. Advanced features, such as password protection and custom domains, require a paid subscription.

Linode^[58]

Many developers use this popular virtual private server host as an alternative to Amazon EC2 for small, cloud-based virtual machines. It supports most flavors of Linux, but not Windows.

prgmr.com^[59]

Another EC2 alternative. It emphasizes support for programmers with its slogan, “We don’t assume you are stupid.” prgmr.com gives you unrestricted root access and lets you install your own Linux kernel.

DigitalOcean^[60]

This cloud hosting platform is similar to Linode. It supports Linux but not Windows. DigitalOcean provides all users with high-performance solid-state drives in instances called droplets. The company claims to be able to provision a new droplet within fifty-five seconds.

Dynamic DNS

Instead of using a cloud server as a reverse proxy, we could have set up a Dynamic DNS that would allow us to access a machine directly even if the IP address were to change (as is common with home Internet service providers, and inevitable when moving to a coffee shop). One example of this kind of service is DynDNS.^[61]

There are endless possibilities for what we can do with these technologies. A virtual cloud server can act as a reverse proxy, as we’ve seen, but it can also host a browser or even an entire programming environment. In the next chapter you’ll learn about some new methods for pair programming, and we’ll use our EC2 instance to facilitate them. You’ll learn how to use it to share an entire screen or just a single window.