These days the line between work and personal IT systems is very hard to define. As more things move to the cloud one’s personal phone or laptop can be used for work communications, code commits, and more. So much so that these days some companies don’t even issue computers to their employees giving an allowance of money to spend on their own personal preference instead.
These working conditions seriously blur the lines of “proprietary” boundaries with regard to IP law. At one point using a work device even to read or write a personal email on the Internet made whatever was written in the legal property of the company that owned the device. In fact, an entire plot arc from Silicon Valley is based on the protagonist doing exactly that and losing his entire company.
Those days of “work only on work devices” seem long gone. Knowledge workers regularly use personal devices for all sorts of work communications that fall under work ownership. Let’s look at some very real use cases:
Obviously, the safest solution is to do everything personal from a personal machine and work from a work machine. This minimally requires carrying around two laptops at the same time in order to context switch in the most separate way possible between work and personal stuff. In fact, you’ll often see coworking live streamers doing exactly that, switching between two laptops.
Personally, however, I find using ssh and RealVNC to make all the difference. These technologies provide very clear distinction between personally owned and work-owned devices. This is because ssh and VNC are merely remote access clients providing no more proprietary bonding of the use of that remote device than would be granted to anyone using any cloud-enabled technology. To compare, consider a company attempting to claim ownership of your email because you use a work computer to access your gmail account over the Internet. Such a claim would be laughed out of court. That company, could, however, perfectly legally monitor the screen of their device while you used it to use these remote access technologies.
The secret to only needing a single work laptop to do everything you care to do during an entire day boils down to the following steps:
git pull read-only copies of dot filesThis prevents another annoying problem when dealing with GitHub and source code: authentication. While some people might be allowed (I’m not) to create a second account on a work device, having to change over to it to get anything done is more of a hassle than just opening up RealVNC. Plus, there is already solid legal precedent for making actual changes to code and git committing them actually from a work device, no matter what the account. This is because the work of making the changes to the code actually took place physically on the work computer. Such is not the case when using RealVNC or ssh just as a client and doing those changes to the remote computer.
Instead, be sure to only login to your work GitHub account and do read-only git clone commands for any publicly available dot files and configurations you use. Then, when a change is needed, do it from RealVNC/ssh and to a git pull to get the latest changes.