We're big fans of virtualized development environments at my startup. Not only is it very helpful in preventing weird environment-related bugs like the autor states, it's a huge shortcut when it comes to bringing new developers onboard. Rather than have them spend hours tracking down links to all the right versions of your various libraries and installing things in the appropriate order, you hand them your image. For us, setup time for a new developer has gone from about a day to about 30 minutes, and most of that is time spent downloading Virtual Box.
In addition, if you get a little too clever and accidentally wipe out something crucial in your environment, you just spin up a new VM. It's a tremendous timesaver.
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We're big fans of virtualized development environments at my startup. Not only is it very helpful in preventing weird environment-related bugs like the autor states, it's a huge shortcut when it comes to bringing new developers onboard. Rather than have them spend hours tracking down links to all the right versions of your various libraries and installing things in the appropriate order, you hand them your image. For us, setup time for a new developer has gone from about a day to about 30 minutes, and most of that is time spent downloading Virtual Box.
In addition, if you get a little too clever and accidentally wipe out something crucial in your environment, you just spin up a new VM. It's a tremendous timesaver.