Exploring development, test, and production environments

Spreadsheet programs that are stored locally don’t need environments. You can run them anywhere. What you are coding in a spreadsheet is what you are coding as you code it, what you are testing when you test it, and what you have coded when you are done for the moment Once we talk about storing information somewhere and having server-side code, we need to consider the path of that code from programmer to the live server. The classic way to think about that is some sort of promotion path. We’ll describe what this might look like in a few different ways; some of them may be more relevant to you than others.

Say, for example, that the application is a new and young website. It is small and fast enough that the code can run on the programmer’s computers which is a similar version of Linux to the eventual live server. Most continuous integration systems today can produce an artifact that is everything you need...