In the past when doing web development, I would usually use something like WAMP to get me a development environment to work locally. However these days with the proliferation of web development technologies, there are just too many tools to have running on your machine. I work in Windows, and having PHP, Ruby, Django, Node, Grails and whatever else all on my system path starts getting a little unwieldy.

Enter virtualisation to the rescue. With VirtualBox and a Linux distro you can build yourself a self contained development environment with all your favourite tools. With a little work, you can customise it just how you like, including getting Git running.