1). Net-accessible dev and staging machines. Net-accessible staging servers are fairly easy to set up if you have a repeatable way of doing deployments. Security can be a mite tricky. Net-accessible dev boxes are modestly more difficult than staging if you do them right. (Simplest way is to use reverse SSH tunnneling on a net-accessible box under your control to your dev box, which is a single trivially Googleable command. The reason this takes thought is that giving the world access to an app server on your machine is potentially a Very Bad Idea.)
If the idea of having HTTP on your laptop does not fill you with mortal dread, Twilio has an OSS called localtunnel which makes your laptop web-accessible in seconds.
2). Source control for every change, deploy scripts to get it to environments safely and repeatably. DVCSes handle lots of little changes fairly elegantly, and you can squash a range of them after you e.g. figure out the magic incantation to get a foreign API working right. (Turning thirty one-character commits and ten deploy tags into a single "Foreign API now works" commit.)
I have done cowboy coding in Putty in the past. There is no excuse for it.
+1 for localtunnel. It's a great service and really easy to use. I've seen similar ones that cost money, but as far as I know localtunnel is still free to use.
Comments
1). Net-accessible dev and staging machines. Net-accessible staging servers are fairly easy to set up if you have a repeatable way of doing deployments. Security can be a mite tricky. Net-accessible dev boxes are modestly more difficult than staging if you do them right. (Simplest way is to use reverse SSH tunnneling on a net-accessible box under your control to your dev box, which is a single trivially Googleable command. The reason this takes thought is that giving the world access to an app server on your machine is potentially a Very Bad Idea.)
If the idea of having HTTP on your laptop does not fill you with mortal dread, Twilio has an OSS called localtunnel which makes your laptop web-accessible in seconds.
2). Source control for every change, deploy scripts to get it to environments safely and repeatably. DVCSes handle lots of little changes fairly elegantly, and you can squash a range of them after you e.g. figure out the magic incantation to get a foreign API working right. (Turning thirty one-character commits and ten deploy tags into a single "Foreign API now works" commit.)
I have done cowboy coding in Putty in the past. There is no excuse for it.
+1 for localtunnel. It's a great service and really easy to use. I've seen similar ones that cost money, but as far as I know localtunnel is still free to use.
http://progrium.com/localtunnel/