Virtualbox

Sometimes it happens that vagrant hangs during boot of your virtual image. Right after typing: ``bash $ vagrant up ` It hangs for a long time and then finally throws: `bash [default] Failed to connect to VM! Failed to connect to VM via SSH. Please verify the VM successfully booted by looking at the VirtualBox GUI. `` If you open VirtualBox you'll see that the virtual machine preview shows a black screen with kernels to choose from. This is GRUB requiring user input to boot further. Here's how to fix that.

Quick tip. If you lose your Vagrant mounts after kernel upgrades in your virtualbox, you'll need to reinstall your VirtualBox Guest Additions. Same is true when you upgrade Vagrant, etc. It's just a real pain and people usually avoid it by never upgrading. Or delve in once they accidentally do. But there's actually a nice & automated way of keeping your VM's guest additions in sync with virtualbox.

Good testing will result in better code. If you have to wait endlessly for on SVN commits, uploads or compile steps, you will simply produce less inventive code. This has to do with: patience, creativity flow, will, and of course time. Constantly being interrupted breaks concentration. If there's one thing I've really learned, it's **invest in a good testing environment**. Rapid review of code results will pay off (I promise).

Recently I've been experimenting with Virtual machines for my development environment. The goal was to create a Virtual Machine that resembles our main production server, and have that Virtual Machine mount my workspace project directory as its DocumentRoot. This way, my code could be served & tested after every save in my IDE. So no more building / committing delays. And all I could mess up was a Virtual Machine.