There’s a particular kind of friction every developer knows: you sit down at a different machine, your laptop instead of your desktop, or your phone while waiting for a train. Then suddenly your project feels far away. The repo isn’t cloned. The Node version is wrong. The database is empty. The ten minutes you had to jot down an idea evaporate into setup.
I wanted to get rid of that friction entirely. The result is a small, always-on development server running on a Raspberry Pi 5 in the corner of my room, and a setup where every device I own: desktop, laptop, Android phone. They’re just a different window into the same live project.
This article is the story of how that environment is built, why it’s shaped the way it is, and where its limits are.
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