A historical journey through local development environments from the 1990s to today. Starting with manual Apache/PHP compilation in the 90s, through XAMPP/*AMP stacks in the 2000s, Docker containerization in the 2010s, and finally cloud-hosted environments in the 2020s. The narrative traces how 'it works on my machine' evolved from a real problem to a solved one, with each era's constraints driving the next innovation. The piece concludes that modern development is moving toward ephemeral, cloud-native environments where Postgres branching, GitHub Codespaces, and AI-powered tools mean your machine is just a terminal into a shared cloud environment.
