PhD students, postdocs and independent researchers often struggle when trying to scale their code and data beyond their local machine, to a HPC cluster or the cloud. This is even more difficult if they don’t happen to have access to IT staff and resources to set up the necessary infrastructure, as is the case in many developing countries. We introduce a new open source, extensible remote development architecture, supported in version 6.1 of the Spyder scientific environment and IDE, that allows users to manage packages, browse files and run code remotely on a completely austere host from the comfort of their local machine.