Working on Cloud

guidence

Introduction

We use lots of local softwares for our work in China. And our software engineer is super trash. Every big giants have their own account systems which are not connected each other. What's more, there are lots of limitations and ads in online softwares. So we prefer to use local softwares. However, when I come to the US and then started an on-campus job, I realized that working on Cloud is super popular in the US. I found that almost everyone uses Google Docs for documents and some cheap clouds such as Google Drive and iCloud. So I want to migrate my daily workflow to cloud in order to adjust to US customs.

So my tasks will be:

  1. Notion for daily work management;
  2. Google softwares/draw.io/figma to replace daily document work;
  3. Overleaf for daily latex for research;
  4. Postman for API testing;
  5. Google IDX/Google Colab/Kaggle Notebook for online Machine Learning development;
  6. Self-host code-server for personal projects which require heavy computation resource.

Tech Stack

As the introduction shown, we will use some marcket-tested products and some opensource projects to do that. What I need is:

  1. Google;
  2. Draw.io;
  3. Figma;
  4. Notion;
  5. Postman;
  6. Kaggle;
  7. Overleaf;
  8. Tailscale;
  9. Code-server.

Deploying Server

It's not easy to deploy a server, especially no public Ip. But I found that Tailscale is a good software that you can build your own network based on VPN and no speed limit.

Here is the start command:

echo "(1/3) Starting tailscale..."
sudo -b tailscale up
echo "(1/3) Tailscale connected."
echo "(2/3) Starting Code Server..."
sudo systemctl start code-server@$USER
echo "(2/3) Code Server service deployed..."
echo "(3/3) Setup tailscale funnel..."
sudo -b tailscale funnel 8080
echo "(3/3) Tailscale funnel service started on 8080."
echo "All done."

What you need to do is to set your windows never sleep.

For code-server, you need to set a proxy in next.config.mjs to debug nextjs/react projects.

/** @type {import('next').NextConfig} */
const nextConfig = {
    // used if wanna debugging via code server
    // https://github.com/coder/code-server/issues/5831
    basePath: "/absproxy/3000"
};
 
export default nextConfig;

Working on Cloud

Working on Google drive is super seamlessly. Draw.io and Notion are also very good for use. However, you need some time to study how to use Notion if you don't have any concept about it. In short, Notion is a beautiful relational database but without SQL.

Conclusion

In this guidence, A whole process and Working on cloud solution were introduced. Working on cloud will be very productive and efficient. It's good for my internship, too.