I got paid for years doing webdev before I achieved anything that I would think of now as "serious development". I'm sure I'll look back in another 5 years and think the same about my current self.
I'm not meaning to say that you yourself are not a serious developer, nor that webdev is not "serious development", but if you do this long enough you will encounter a problem that happens in production that can't be reproduced in your dev environment.
Yes, it's a good idea to have your development environment mimic production as closely as is practical, even if it's not something that you currently practice.
My objection to that is that in the long run it will make the source code less portable and thus limit my options and also may increase the risk when doing future upgrades.
I prefer if my team develops on different operating systems or Linux distributions and point realeses, not only for early catching of weird behavior but also usually this will in the long run eliminate any environment assumptions in the source code and thus create a cleaner code base.
If it is necessary to replicate an exact production behavior I have staging for that.
>I got paid for years doing webdev before I achieved anything that I would think of now as "serious development". I'm sure I'll look back in another 5 years and think the same about my current self.
Maybe your definition of "serious development" is whatever is around your current level instead of something objective?
I'm not sure that there's such a thing as an objective definition of "serious development", and my response clearly puts a spotlight on the subjectivity of the term, does it not?
I'm not meaning to say that you yourself are not a serious developer, nor that webdev is not "serious development", but if you do this long enough you will encounter a problem that happens in production that can't be reproduced in your dev environment.
Yes, it's a good idea to have your development environment mimic production as closely as is practical, even if it's not something that you currently practice.