Using an iPad Pro for Development

I’ve used a Mac Book Pro as my primary development environment for the last 15 years. As a DevOps Engineer, it’s great to work on a platform that closely resembles Linux, is easy to use and is lightweight. However, I don’t want to carry a laptop bag, backpack, and shoulder bag when I travel.

After looking at the Mac Book Air and other lightweight laptops, I decided on an iPad Pro 11” with Wifi + Cellular and a Magic Keyboard, and it’s been fantastic.

So why move to an iPad Pro? For me, it’s about a few things:

• It’s small and easily fits into my shoulder bag, so no more laptop bag when I travel. Everything I need is there
• It has all the apps I need to do my work, Chrome, Slack, Gmail, Jira and most importantly, termius, an SSH client.

I chose the Wifi + Cellular package since there is an inevitable time when I don’t have reliable Wifi and need to do something, so I look at it as a backup way to connect to the Internet.

I use termius to connect to my AWS EC2 instances, DigitalOcean Droplets. I already have a dotfiles setup to configure OSX and Linux with all the tools I need to do my job, such as; vim, tmux, brew, kubectl, terraform and k9s.

My Development setup. Vim with NerdTree on the top pane and a bash shell with powerline in the bottom. All running in tmux with 2 screens.

The other tools I use all work the same. The apps for Google Docs and Sheets work the same as they do on my desktop.

Google Docs while writing this article.

I use Grammarly to check my writing, and the keyboard integration works even better than the desktop because it works anywhere I type text, so that it will work not only in the browser but also in Slack and iMessage. This prevents me from accidental misspellings and bad grammar.

Grammarly keyboard checking messages inside the Slack App.

Another advantage of using an iPad Pro is that it is all backed up to Apple Cloud. If I lose it, I purchase a new one and recover it using my Apple account. While this will still suck, there is minimal configuration I’ll need to do to get back up and running. Unlike if I lost my MacBook Pro, where I have a lot of local customizations and configurations that don’t get backed to the cloud, it would take me days, if not weeks, to get it back to a fully functioning state.

In conclusion, after travelling with my iPad Pro, I’m convinced that it’s the right platform for me to do my development work, write articles and reduce the number of bags I need to keep track of.