Building a Device-Agnostic Web Development Setup 2025 Edition: My Journey with an iPad

Photo by Ernest Ojeh on Unsplash

Over the past decade, I’ve written about my unconventional journey as a developer using an iPad for web development. To me, being device-agnostic is the ultimate freedom — working from anywhere, on any device. I’ve even debugged critical issues from my phone, riding a bus in Seattle — before mobile tools had evolved to what we see today.

While my setup has evolved with time, the core components remain simple: a remote server, SSH, Vim, and a terminal session manager. It’s a reliable system, but as new tools and IDEs have emerged, I’ve often felt like the “grandpa coder.” My setup can handle everything the modern ones can (and often more), but I don’t have the shiny new IDE. It’s not a problem for me — yet, to better support my team, I’ve started integrating more modern tools. This article will walk you through the upgraded stack I’ve adopted, showing you how you can build a fully mobile, device-agnostic development environment too.

The Heart of the System: An Ubuntu Server Running Docker

At the core of my development setup is a remote server running Ubuntu, powered by Docker. Over the years, I’ve had different servers, but today I rely on two: one hosted on Digital Ocean and the other in my home network. Neither…