"I think it's better if the devs run something close to the production environment."
I used to think so too, but I changed my mind a few years ago. Have diversity in the environment in the phases leading up to staging/testing leads to many problems being uncovered early - hardcoded paths, platform assumptions, potential performance issues that only show under some circumstances, ...
I think it improves the code if various devs use different installation paths, DB's, development tools and even OS's. I've seen many deployment issues that would have trivially been detected if devs had different environments.
I used to think so too, but I changed my mind a few years ago. Have diversity in the environment in the phases leading up to staging/testing leads to many problems being uncovered early - hardcoded paths, platform assumptions, potential performance issues that only show under some circumstances, ...
I think it improves the code if various devs use different installation paths, DB's, development tools and even OS's. I've seen many deployment issues that would have trivially been detected if devs had different environments.