VPN Guide
VPN for Developers
What's happening
You turned on a VPN. Something in your development workflow broke. You're not sure if it's the VPN or a coincidence.
Your SSH connections drop when the VPN is active. Your local server isn't reachable. Docker behaves differently. You're not sure which of these are VPN problems.
You need to test how your app behaves from different regions. You're not sure if a VPN is the right tool for that or if there's something better.
Your company requires VPN for accessing internal resources. It conflicts with your personal setup. You're not sure how to run both.
What people assume
Most developers assume a VPN is transparent to their workflow. It usually isn't. VPNs intercept and reroute all traffic — including traffic that development tools, local servers, and container networking assume will stay local. What works without a VPN may behave differently with one active.
Most developers assume split tunnelling solves routing conflicts. It can — but only if configured to route the right traffic. A VPN that routes everything through the tunnel will intercept traffic that should stay local. One that routes nothing useful through the tunnel doesn't help with the original problem.
Most developers assume VPN choice doesn't matter much for technical use. It does. Kill switch behaviour, DNS leak prevention, IPv6 handling, and split tunnelling granularity vary significantly across providers. What fails with one provider may work cleanly with another.
What's actually going on
Development workflows involve traffic at multiple levels — local network, container networking, SSH, external APIs — and a VPN sits across all of them. The conflicts that appear are usually routing conflicts, not VPN failures.
The developer VPN problem is a control problem. Most VPNs are built for consumers who want one button. Developers often need to decide which traffic goes through the tunnel and which doesn't — and that granularity isn't always available.
Where this leads
If the issue is tooling conflicts — SSH drops, local server routing, container networking, DNS — that's a configuration and control problem specific to developer use. See how developer use changes VPN requirements
If the issue is running alongside a corporate VPN — conflicts between personal and work tunnels, routing that breaks internal access — that's a multi-tunnel conflict. See how work VPN conflicts actually work
If the issue is stability during long coding sessions — connections that drop, tools that break mid-session — that's a reliability question. See how session reliability works in long work contexts
If the interest is privacy for development work — protecting what the network sees about your API calls, database connections, or external service use — that's a privacy question in a technical context. See how network-level privacy works for technical traffic
No guarantees
A VPN that works for a colleague may break your specific toolchain. Development environments are too varied for generic configuration to work universally.
Split tunnelling is not always granular enough to solve routing conflicts cleanly. Some providers allow per-app routing. Others only allow full tunnel or no tunnel.
A VPN cannot replicate a real user's network conditions for testing purposes. It changes your apparent location but not the full routing path a real user in that location would experience.
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