My laptop died in May and I can replace it around October, not before. I want to spend the summer on Python and eventually some backend work, and I have an iPad Air with a keyboard case and decent wifi. Before I sink three months into a workaround, is anyone actually doing this past the toy stage, and where does it stop working?
Works for reading, editing, running scripts, git. Stops working the moment you need Docker, a debugger with breakpoints in a GUI, or an emulator. Plan the summer around the first list and buy the laptop before you touch the second.
I did four months of this while travelling and the thing that broke me was not the editor, it was everything around the editor. Two windows plus a terminal plus documentation on a tablet means constant swapping, and the keyboard case has no escape key row you can hit reliably in the dark. I still learned plenty, but I was maybe two thirds as productive per hour compared to a cheap secondhand laptop I later bought for about the price of three months of that VPS.
That last line is the argument I needed. A used ThinkPad is not out of reach if I skip the VPS.
Do not try to make the iPad the computer, make it the screen. Rent the cheapest VPS you can find, put your files there, and connect over SSH with a decent terminal app. You get a real Linux box, real Python, real git, and the iPad is only responsible for showing text and taking keystrokes, which it is genuinely good at.
No, you forward the port and open localhost in Safari, or just bind the dev server to the VPS and hit its address. The bit that genuinely annoys me is that split screen on an 11 inch iPad means your editor is postcard sized while you look at the page.
Does that fall apart the second I need to look at a web page I am building?
Sideways answer: if you might end up liking mobile development, the Swift environment Apple ships for iPad is not a toy and people have shipped real apps to the store from it. Completely useless for your Python plan, but if the goal is a year of not being blocked, it is the one path where the iPad is the intended machine rather than a hostage situation.
@venv_val · 2mo ago
Cloud editors in the browser cover most of the first six months, and the free allowance on the hosted ones is usually enough for evening study if you remember to stop the machine when you close the lid. Two things to know before you commit: your session can go to sleep mid-exercise and you lose whatever was only in memory, and file uploads and downloads are fiddly enough that any tutorial involving a local CSV becomes a small chore. Neither is fatal. Both are daily friction.
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