Why I Love the Cloud

Disclaimer: While I know it is overused, I am going to use the term "cloud" a lot. By cloud I mean data stored remotely that can be accessed via the web

I think I truly fell in love with the cloud as a graduate student.

At this point in my schooling I spent the majority of my waking hours on campus, but at different computers. I would be on my laptop in class, a desktop in the computer lab between classes, and a desktop I had in my on-campus office the rest of the time.

In order to get work done I had to make sure that my files were available on whichever machine I was working. This actually ended up being pretty easy - I just needed to sign up for Dropbox. I could then access important files from anywhere via the internet. By cping some files to a special directory I could review my homework assignments on my phone while I walked to class or pick up where I left off on my C++ project from any computer in the lab.

As I further embraced "living in the cloud" I added additional tools to my arsenal.

I finally wised up and started using version control which lead me to using Github.

<rant> Before I move on I just want to say - colleges should be teaching students to use version control. Everyone that codes should be using version control. Honestly it shouldn't even be limited to coding, version control can be used in various other ways as well. The basics of version control are not very difficult to learn and can save new developers hours of headache by allowing them to checkpoint their code. </rant>

For papers I began using Google Drive (Google Docs at the time). This alleviated the need of even having a word processor for written assignments and allowed for real time collaboration during larger group projects.

I still use all of these tools to this day. I switch between computers slightly less than in school since I rarely need to do work-work at home, but I still have my work repos cloned just in case and can easily access my work Drive account as well.

I didn't decide to write this post to talk about tools everyone already knows about - I wrote it because I was recently reminded just how ubiquitous the cloud has become in my life and how thankful I am for that.

My phone was stolen earlier this week. This is a huge pain. After holding out hope for 36 hours I accepted the facts and had my service switched back to my old phone.

My stolen phone was an iPhone and my old phone is a Galaxy S3. While Google and Apple both want you to feel the pain of disconnect to dissuade traders, the pain of switching really isn't that bad. While it does help that I was reactivating an old phone and not starting from scratch, as soon as I synced up with Google it was almost as if I had been using my old phone the whole time.

Again, the fact that I can sync my contacts through Google and have them on my old and new phone isn't exactly groundbreaking news - but it's nice to have that convenience during such an inconvenient time.

What inspired this post was Strava, the application I use to track my runs.

I don't know why, but when I went to run for the first time using my old phone I thought, "this stinks, all my old runs are going to be gone". However, when I signed in they were all there. Even though it really doesn't matter that I have those runs stored it made me happy to see them in my feed.

As someone that works on web based applications I should not be surprised that the internet has stored some of my data. But as someone that just had something of value stolen from them it felt nice knowing my information wasn't taken away from me as well.

I do not want to get in the dangers of cloud storage or how my data is being stolen or sold or whatever. I just wanted to say that regardless of the technical details, this functionality made me feel good.

We make tools to help others. As developers I think we forget this since we are always looking for the negative - the bug, the slow points, the features we haven't implemented yet.

It's rewarding to be reminded of the positives - the features you do have, the pain points you are alleviating in someone else's day, how much has been changed since day 1. One of my favorite part of work is when my co-workers share how excited they are because one of our tools saved them a bunch of time or caught something they would have missed.

I think what I am trying to do is thank the cloud, the internet, all of the companies, teams, open source contributors out there that make life easier, especially those that help me forget that I am using a three year old phone because they provide seamless transitions between devices.